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• Chair(s): Elizabeth and Paul N. Billinger - 1 Long Row Close, Everdon, Daventry NN11 3BE Email: [email protected] Vector 3 • Membership Secretary: Estelle Roberts - 97 Sharp Street, Newland Avenue, Hull, HU5 2AE The Critical Journal of the BFSA Email: [email protected] • Treasurer: Martin Potts - 61 Ivy Croft Road, Warton, Nr Tamworth B79 0JJ Email: [email protected] Contents • Publications Manager: Kathy Taylor - Email: [email protected] 3 Editorial : The View from the Blue Moon • Orbiters: Carol Ann Kerry-Green - 278 Victoria Avenue, by Andrew Butler Hull, HU5 3DZ 3 TO Letters to Vector Email: [email protected] • Awards: Claire Brialey - 4 Bending the World Email: [email protected] an Interview with Karen Traviss by Andrew M. Butler • Publicity/Promotions: 8 Lines and Circles Email: [email protected] Andrew M. Butler on Pamela Zoline's 'The Heat Death of • London Meeting Coordinator: Farah Mendlesohn - the Universe' 22 Addington Road, Reading, RG1 5PT 11 Lining the Mind’s Inside • Webmistress: Tanya Brown - Flat 8, Century House, Steve Sneyd on the poetry of New Worlds Armoury Road, London, SE8 4LH Email: [email protected] 17 First Impressions Book Reviews edited by Paul Billinger

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• Book Reviews: Paul N. Billinger - 1 Long Row Close, Other BSFA Publications Everdon, Daventry NN11 3BE Email: [email protected] Focus: Simon Morden - 13 Egremont Drive, Sherriff Hill, Gateshead, NE9 5SE Email [email protected] • Associate Editor: Tanya Brown - Flat 8, Century House, Armoury Road, London SE8 4LH Email: amaranth@ amaranth.aviators.net Matrix Commissioning Editor: Tom Hunter - Email: [email protected] Vector News & Features Editor: Claire Weaver - Email: [email protected] Published by the BSFA ©2004 ISSN 0505 0448 Production Editor: Martin McGrath - 91 Bentley Drive, Harlow, Essex CM17 9QT All opinions are those of the individual contributors and Email: [email protected] should not necessarily be taken as the views of the editors or the BSFA

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Limited by guarantee. Company No. 921500 Registered BSFA Web page: address: 1 Long Row Close, Everdon, Daventry, NN11 3BE. http://www.bsfa.co.uk The BSFA is a non-profitmaking organisation, staffed entirely by unpaid volunteers. September/October 2004 • Vector 237

Editorial

The View from the Blue Moon previous transit could not have happened in his lifetime, and assuming that he didn't have access to a time machine - although Looking at my Lemony Snicket calendar - yes, OK, I know - I I presume that if anyone could build a time machine from noticed that last Saturday was a blue moon. Remembering the household object, Hart-Davis could - then the footage was rigged. phrase, “Once in a blue moon”, I wondered precisely what a blue Faked. A camera trick. CGI. They had a very small Andy Serkiss moon is. Apparently, it's a second full moon within the same and painted over him. Or something. Reality wasn't so easy. month. As the lunar cycle is round about twenty-eight days, and The pinhole was a washout - too much light pollution from months are twenty-eight to thirty-one days, these can clearly the sun to get a clear disc. The binoculars - well, which way up happen, but not often - it must be a full moon fairly close to the should they be? And again light pollution. Eventually I managed start of a month, followed by one pretty close to the end. to get them lined up correctly, projecting a somewhat oblate So then, you learn something new every day. circle onto the piece of paper (when that wasn't blowing away) But how rare is that then? Pretty rare I would have thought, which clearly had a spot on it in the place I expected Venus to be. but then my brother pointed out that there are roughly thirteen Good enough for me. Or maybe it was an ant. I went back inside lunar cycles in a year, and only twelve months. One of those to try and watch the tv coverage, but reception is lousy at the best months has to have a second full moon. of times. Ah well, in eight years. Once in a blue moon is once a year. Except that I read that it'll happen at night so we won't see it. Not so rare then - no more so than a birthday. That's odd, I thought, Venus is more visible at night. You'd have And come to think of it, the moon was distinctly red, a harvest thought the transit would be clearer. moon. All in all, not a useful phrase. The whole point of this exercise, scientifically speaking, is that Once in a transit of Venus, on the other hand, is twice every by timing the transit from several positions on the Earth you can 120-odd years, in that one happens, eight years pass, then it triangulate the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Or possibly the happens again, then you have to wait another 120 years. This is Earth to Venus. All you need to do is make sure that your watches pretty rare - a twice (once?) in a lifetime deal. The transit occurs are synchronised and accurate, that you know where you are, and when Venus passes across the disc of the Sun, an eclipse which that everyone agree that Venus is touching the edge of the Sun at happens so rarely because of the differing incline of orbits of the the same time. Presumably you also have to compare results. Earth and Venus. It's kind of surprising that it either misses entirely When they did this in the 1 770s they discovered Australia, which or moves neatly across the sun, but presumably transits take suggests they were looking in the wrong direction (and actually it different times, and my head hurts if I get too scientific. was the east coast they discovered, the Dutch having found and So, we had one of these transits recently, and whereas with been satisfied with the west coast back in 1606. And it must have the total eclipse a few years back I actually headed away from been a relief for the Aboriginals to be discovered after all those totality, this time I would be in the zone. Adam Hart-Davis, that years). James Burke for the twenty-first century, gave clear instructions: As far as I know Adam Hart-Davis didn't discover Australia don't look at it directly unless you have the special glasses, but this time, but no one seemed to quite agree on when the start and instead use a pinhole in a piece of card, or a pair of binoculars or stop times of the transit were. They tried to assure us that the Sun a telescope to shine through. Easy enough, I thought. I can do was still the same distance away, which is just as well, because it that. I have cardboard. I have pins. I have bins. It looks easy looks hot and you wouldn't want it to fall into your back garden enough. whilst you were playing with binoculars and a sheet of paper. It's What should have struck me was that we were shown footage a health and safety nightmare. of Hart-Davis projecting a transit very clearly onto a piece of card several days before the event. Given we've established the

Andrew M Butler Canterbury, Summer 2004

over to join in the New Wave excitement, were Jon Bing and Tor Age Bringsvaerd. They went back to Oslo and put on a very successful play, Little Lost Rocket Ship (I translate) in the Norwegian equivalent of the Old Vic. Tor Age eventually went to live in Spain. Jon still lives in Oslo and is a distinguished lawyer. Of course I did not get the nationality of Jannick Storm confused. He's the guy to whom Billion Year Spree is dedicated. I used to stay with Jannick in Copenhagen and we're still in touch. Les Hurst doesn't imagine Copenhagen is in Norway, does he, by any chance?!

Meanwhile, in V235, David Langford had the sheer effrontery to note our misprint of www.wildsidepress.com in V235, and provided a URL Letters to Vector for a Langford bibliography. The saga continues... A few issues back, in V233, Brian Aldiss helped kicked off the New Wave commemoration with a short article containing the line From David Langford, via email “Norwegians and Americans came over to join in the fun". L.J. Hurst Regarding my nitpicking of URL typos, the BSFA has the last laugh! Although my mention of a bibliography on my site at queried this detail in a letter printed in V235, asking, “ is Brian Aldiss www.ansible.demon.co.uk was reproduced with flawless accuracy, mis-remembering the nationality of Jannick Storm?". We went to these pages ceased to exist in late July. Everything is now at Brian Aldiss for a response, which we received just after V236 went ansible.co.uk ... to press:

From Brian W. Aldiss, via email They don't call it “the Curse of Vector" for nothing. Actually, they Les Hurst is mistaken. The Norwegians I was referring to, who came don't call it “the Curse of Vector"... Perhaps they should.

3 Vector 237 • September/October 2004

Of course the edge of any potential smugness is taken off by the fact that we once more misspelt www.wildsidepress.com in a review Letters to Vector should be sent to Andrew M. Butler, Dept of Media, in V236. We'll get it right just as they change their URL. Okay, gang: Canterbury Christ Church University College, Canterbury, CT1 1QU or write out, one hundred times, www.wildsidepress.com. Yes, Billinger, emailed to [email protected] and marked ‘For publication’. We I know you want to go out and play, but we're all going to stay here reserve the right to edit or shorten letters. until we get it right...

SOME AUTHORS SEEM TO HIT THE GROUND RUNNING: IN 2004 KAREN TRAVISS WILL HAVE PUBLISHED THREE NOVELS. VECTOR SPOKE TO HER ABOUT CLARION, COMPLEX CHARACTERS AND COMMERCE Bending the World an Interview with Karen Traviss by Andrew M. Butler

Andrew M. Butler: What draws you to writing sf, fantasy and F-word that I actually have done has all been in Realms of horror? Fantasy, and that’s a bit too public for me to deny it, and I have a Karen Traviss: Well, I don’t do horror per se and I rarely do short in the next Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. So okay, I do a fantasy. But I can tell you exactly what started me on sf as a kid: it bit of fantasy now and then. I was old and I needed the money. was a single event. I was about five and I saw the title sequence of But no dragons or elves, okay? It’s not that I don’t respect fantasy, A For Andromeda on TV, which was steam-operated in those especially high fantasy. It sells three times the volume that sf does. days, of course. I asked my mother what Andromeda was and she It’s just that I’m not writing it. Yet. Note that I never use the word said it was some stars that were so far away that the light took never. If the market moved that way for me, I’d be in there with years to reach us. Now, however simply expressed, that’s one hell mages and talking swords and the whole shebang. But still no of an answer for a small child to consider. I was completely bloody dragons. Terry Pratchett is the only person who should be mesmerized by the idea and I got to wondering what else was out allowed to write about dragons. there. In fact, that epiphany is actually in the acknowledgements AMB: I suppose what I’m thinking of as horror and fantasy, the for City of Pearl. My mum read the page and said, “I don’t bloody stuff from Realms of Fantasy and On-Spec, has a sense of well remember saying that". Well, maybe you had to be there. quirkiness rather than gross-out or more bloody dragons. Are Makes you wonder how many lives we change with a single you tempted to write comedy? comment and don’t actually realise that we’ve KT: Yes, I do write humour, and I bury a bit of done so. grim reality in the humour and a few laughs in I read a lot of Golden Age sf as a kid, and I the grim stuff. I don’t think you can separate wrote for my own amusement. As an adult, them; if you consider what mechanism laughter what appeals to me about writing sf - because is, they’re one in the same. Having spent a lot of I’ve read very little of it in recent years - is that my life around the armed forces and the it offers such a huge canvas to work upon. Just emergency services, I see this edge between look at the range of sub-genres within it, the age horror and hysterical humour all the time. Even range it appeals to, the stylistic variety. For me, in truly awful combat situations, people end up it’s specifically the capacity it gives you to ask finding some things very funny. And then hard questions and bend worlds to answer them there’s the police and firefighter jokes - or not answer them, as the case may be. syndrome. Outsiders are appalled by the black I want to explore what people do when they humour, but they need it, believe me - it’s a have to live with the choices technology and safety valve. Good taste prevents me giving science gives them, and how they handle good examples, because when you remove the relations with creatures that aren’t the same as joke from its context - mitigating personal them. One of the themes that most occupies me trauma - it can look pretty sick. is the dividing line between the “us" that we AMB: Which writers have influenced you? treat with respect and can empathise with, and KT: It’s hard to say, because the writers who “them" - the external bin into which we dump people compare me to aren’t those I’ve read. those who we can crap on and get away with it. That can be a But I can tell you which writers or books I would save from a gender line, a race line, a species line, a class line, whatever. burning building. The book I want to be buried with is Bill The Wherever it’s drawn - consciously or not - it’s the tipping point at Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison. I read it first when I was which even apparently nice, decent people say somewhere in thirteen. I’ve re-read it every year since (and bought many copies) their mind, “It’s okay to do this because they’re not like us". and it just gets better each time. I’m still finding stuff in it that I The line I look at most is the one between humans and other didn’t spot or understand before. I was on a panel with Harry at animals, because I think it’s the most neglected one, and possibly TorCon last year and I was almost beside myself with excitement. the most relevant for an sf writer. If we can’t treat non-human I did the fannish thing and got him to re-sign my first edition of animals with some degree of respect, how are we going to deal BTCH (which he had signed for its original owner long ago) and with aliens? Readers and critics have said that City of Pearl made he was utterly charming about it. You think I’m OTT about the them feel uncomfortable in places because it made them think book? “The robomule had packing glanders." If that isn’t the best about a universal order that they took for granted: I had one e­ line ever laid down on paper, I don’t know what is. Clever, mail from a reader in the USA saying it had changed the way he clever, funny, sad stuff. It’s not that its style influenced me as a looked at animals, and that was very rewarding. I don’t tell people writer, although it did encourage me to write sf: but it showed me what they should think. I just invite them to look in the places that you need the contrast between humour and tragedy - the they don’t normally go, and what they see is up to them. It’s just chiaroscuro, as Sean Stewart calls it - to create a truly vivid story. reportage, really. Damn, I even use phrases like “keep your wug shut," and I get a lot of ribbing about fantasy, because the little bit of the “two s’s for officers only".

4 September/October 2004 • Vector 237

AMB: How did you get into journalism? Are you a full-time down your throat for six weeks, and the duration is probably the fiction writer now? most critical part of it. You're locked up with writing and you KT: I did other things first, including being an advertising can't run away from it. You'll know at the end of that time if copywriter, and then I went back to college and did the one year you're cut out to write professionally or not. It saves you dabbling NCTJ journalism diploma, which at the time pretty well around for years and finding that you're not up for the criticism or guaranteed you a job from a sponsoring newspaper. I've always the deadlines or the slog. I'm sure other people have had very been prepared to make career changes and go back and learn new different experiences and drawn different benefits from it, but in skills. I wanted to be a journalist from age six, but I got diverted the end all Clarion can do is say, “Here's writing for a living in for a year or so before I did it. one megadose. Like it?" All I know is that I planned on going, By the time your interview is published, I will be a full-time knew what I wanted to get out of it and was delighted when I fiction writer. So, fast-forwarding a few weeks: yes, I'm a full-time found it gave me what I expected and more. I can't understand fiction writer. I cut the day job to part-time and it was still too why the Clarion technique - and by that I mean six intensive much to enable me to meet my book commitments and do weeks - isn't being used widely in other genres. It's a damn impulsive things like sleep. My employer was unwilling to let me shame Clarion East has been under threat, too. reduce my hours further, and I'd had enough of living in Dilbert AMB: In case some of our readers are unfamiliar with it, can you World, so I jacked it in. That was on the business plan too - pay describe the Clarion method? off the mortgage and quit the day job. So far, I'm on target. KT: The Clarion method is basically a literary cage-fight. A group AMB: Has your journalism career helped your fiction writing? of fifteen to twenty writers are locked up for six weeks with a KT: Every time I see colleagues suffering over the nuts-and-bolts sequence of tutors. You write short fiction until you drop and it's side of writing, I realise how great it is to be a hack. That makes critted in the group: mornings for crits, rest of the day for writing. me sound like Father Dougal, but it's true - “Sure, Ted, and it's You have six tutors over a six-week period who are all established great to be a hack, so it is". Journalism gives you everything you pros. You write and write and write and then your class shreds the need to survive: impenetrably thick skin, inexhaustible stories as they roll in, and in my year we did over a hundred (I persistence, deadline discipline, clean copy habits, contact­ think). It's the pattern that's used at Milford too, except six weeks making skills and more background material than you could ever of critting and writing is a wholly different experience to a nice dream of. Rejection bounces off hacks - you'd never survive day civilised week of crits at Milford. I've never known people resort one in a newsroom if you felt your story was sacred. Your copy or to cannibalism at Milford, however small the portions at breakfast, footage is torn apart, mixed with other people's stuff, and spat out but it's a close-run thing at some Clarions, apparently. It's intense, the other end, and then it's gone and you get on with the next job good and bad. You make good buddies. Some people make good if you're not already three jobs down the line. You meet the un-buddies, too. The food isn't as bad as they tell you, either, but deadlines or you don't work: you write fast or you get eaten by an the heat and mosquitoes are. editor. And you know it's just business, nothing personal. So if I'd do it again in an instant if they'd run a refresher for pros. It you don't have to work at surviving the emotionally painful was a blast. It changed my life. procedural bits of writing, then you can devote all your energy to AMB: The stories I have read, and the novel, have been in the story. American markets. Why do you think you've sold overseas Editors know by now that I do what it says on the tin. They before you have in the UK? Have you had to sacrifice anything don't have to worry about hurting my feelings and they can move for a non-British market? deadlines around without my having the vapours. And the KT: This is going to sound glib, but I went straight to the US copyeditor has an easier time too. Hacks are low-maintenance market from Clarion. I had a specific plan. I'm not ignoring the writers by and large. We're all loveable and fully house-trained. UK; it's just that I saw sf/f as predominantly an American market Honest. with much bigger readership so that's where I aimed. I never And working as a defence correspondent was a fiction gold thought of the UK market as being open to me. mine, as was covering criminal courts for years. I also derived a Writing for me is business, not art. I love it, but it's still my staggering amount of material from my various PR incarnations. living and I've got to be pragmatic. I had a five-year business plan Not one scrap of my working life will go on the cutting-room when I started writing seriously in 1998 and that was part of it - floor. It's a bottomless coffee pot of ideas and factoids. And target the US. Clarion was a fast-track to that market. I made all metaphors, as you can see. my contacts there, and that got me my first agent (who sold the AMB: You went to Clarion; what do you think such a writing City of Pearl series) and my intro to a certain short fiction workshop has given you? magazine whose editor has been very kind to me. I'm especially KT: An instant career. I was at Clarion East in the summer of 2000 indebted to tutors Greg Frost and Sean Stewart. and by summer 2002 I'd sold a novel trilogy and I had stories in And yes, you do need a business plan. I'm on my second five- Asimov's: I've got three paperback titles out in 2004, my first year year plan now. in print as a novelist, and a leather-bound first edition from Easton I have never had to change anything to make it palatable for Press. Would I have done that without Clarion? Not a chance, the US market, except spelling of course, nor have I been asked especially living in the UK. I'm not pretending Clarion is an to. All my material and style is unashamedly English and the automatic passport, but it lays the kit out on the table for you and language I use is often regional English, military and police slang if you're prepared to pick it up and use it, it can work and Portsmouth dialect - and I still haven't been asked to water spectacularly well. anything down, not even in the Star Wars book I've just Clarion gave me two specific things: business contacts and completed. There's this myth that Americans suffer from cultural advanced craft. I like to use the carpentry analogy. When I started xenophobia, but I've never experienced it either from readers or writing fiction seriously in late 1998, I could hammer in nails and editors. I find the US market open-minded and welcoming. I think saw wood to length. Then the first workshop I attended - Liz there's no greater proof of that than the fact that Lucasfilm and Del Holliday's One Step Beyond - taught me to make proper mitred Rey gave me free rein when I wrote Republic Commando. I had corners, do dovetails and saw straight lines with hand tools. Then to work within the canon, and that's both challenging and fun, but Clarion taught me to use power tools. The sense of empowerment I wrote the story I wanted to write, and it's got all the facets that that it gave me was unbelievable. I hate that word, but it's the City of Pearl and its sequels have. only one that describes it. It was that Garfield moment: “Get off, AMB: I have to be careful what I say, as I've this pile of Roswell King Kong". High novelisations at my elbow which I've just bought, but a One of the good things about Clarion is that it shoves writing large part of me feels that if you've got the ability to write and

5 Vector 237 • September/October 2004 sell a story, then set it in your own universe. There’s an damnedest to make sure that the SW reader gets the same effort impressive list of names of people who have written wookie and entertainment from me as the ethics professor who just made books, of course, but I wonder if you can say a little more about City of Pearl a course book for his class. what you got out of writing a Star Wars book? Fiction is the entertainment industry, and you owe it to readers KT: Oh, ye of little faith. This is going to sound lairy, but it's to give of your best, regardless of the universe, because they can perfectly possible to do both, and it's a wholly different take their money elsewhere. They're not daft. They can see when experience. Any writer who says there's no artistic challenge or you're giving less than 100%. merit in writing in someone else's universe - and I've had a few AMB: Would you write a script for Star Wars or any other sneers - hasn't actually done it, or - let me be really callous - franchise? hasn't been asked to do it. It takes a whole new level of discipline KT: Yes, I'd look at any work I'm offered, and if I can fit it in and to fit the canon and remain true to the flavour of the world you've it's not one of those rare things that I find offensive (yes, I do have been invited into while still retaining your own style and some no-go areas!) then I'm up for it. My agent is ready and approach - which is what they sign you up for in the first place. waiting... It's not ghost writing; it's your book. There was a time when I AMB: Has there been any interest in optioning your fiction for thought it wasn't something I'd want to do, but it turned out that it the big or small screen? was right up my street - or one of my streets, anyway. I have KT: It's early days to even think about film options (City of Pearl many. has been out since March) but my agent is now Russ Galen, and I was lucky: the clone commando bit of the SW universe was he's good on film deals. relatively virgin territory, so Republic Commando gave me huge AMB: When I heard you speak at TorCon, and indeed within a scope and what I wrote became canon in itself. It must be really couple of minutes of meeting you at the International tough to write existing characters like Luke and Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Leia and keep them fresh because you have to Florida, you announced yourself as being face thirty years of fan expectation of what right-wing. Why do you felt the need to do they're like, but I've not ventured there yet. this? That's advanced stuff. KT: I've been known to introduce myself as the In Republic Commmando, the plot was token right-winger when the panel topic is mine and the characters were mine, but fitting political. It gets a few laughs. But yes, it's true. in with the canon forced me to come up with Everyone else I know in the sf community is an some ideas and work-rounds that turned out up-front liberal with a small L and it gets lonely better than if I'd had total free rein. Necessity out there for ranting old Meldrews like me. The really is the mother of invention. And it forces right-wing thing baffles Americans, because you to think about your craft a lot more. There their definition of the Right is George Bush. I are no oranges in Star Wars, because it's a had people come up to me at TorCon after a totally constructed universe; so all those panel and say, “You don't sound right-wing." analogies about surfaces like orange peel are Well, against that sort of yardstick... out. Think about it - that's a lot of words you Yes, I've been mistaken for a Marxist and can't use. By the time you've been denied all an anarchist on several occasions and I can see your favourite cliches, you're forced to redefine that some of my economic views are those of your approach. As with my own universes, I the hard Left. I think the divide now is not built it on the characters and I got very involved between right and left but between liberals and with them. And remember that this was an adult non-liberals. I've spent my entire working life - both in book that also had to be suitable for some very young readers. I newsrooms and in local government - being scrupulously had to do that without compromising the darker, adult themes of apolitical, so it does surprise people when they find out what my the story, and that's not easy. I also proved to myself that I could private views are, because everyone seems to think I agree with write realistic soldiers' dialogue without Anglo-Saxon expletives, them regardless of their beliefs. It's a way of listening that you which was a big step forward for me. learn as a journalist; you “go grey", as our chums in the Here's my list of reasons for doing tie-ins, in some sort of intelligence community say, and blend in. Alas, I can't find a order. The money; the exposure to a wholly new audience, which single major political party now that I could line up with (if I ever is great for sales of your other titles; contact with very committed did) so I vote Green. No journalist can ever take politicians fans, who have been a sheer delight; a rest from your own seriously anyway. Working with them really does make you party- universes; the thrill of testing your skills; the flattery of being apolitical whether you want to be or not. That's not to say I don't asked; the opportunity to have a really fresh look at your own like them. I do, and some of them are good friends. writing; and working with an industry worth zillions. I loved every AMB: I suppose there’s an assumption in many readers, and second of it. Lucasfilm/LucasArts were fun to work with. I had this especially critics, that the author identifies with or shares the fantastic bloke on call at LucasArts to check my continuity and outlook of their main character. I’m sure we can think of writers canon, because I knew zip about Star Wars before I got the where this is true and who even manipulate the narrative to contract, and he answered my every daft question. He had the prove them right or to discredit those who disagree. So... patience of a saint and he was available seven days a week. In this politicians don’t get a smooth ride in City of Pearl, there’s a case, I was also tying in to a game, and that was brilliant - I can't suspicion of big business, the scientists won’t listen to common discuss it until the book's out, but there's some cool crossover that sense... How far do you identify with Shan’s opinions and made me very happy. Sad thing that I am... actions? She’s not the only viewpoint character, of course. How Critical acclaim is all very well. But I would rather be read by far does playing fair as an author mean you end up a hundred thousand people who'll enjoy the book as a war story ventriloquising ideas you don’t support? and then perhaps think about some of the more difficult dilemmas KT: No, none of the characters are my viewpoint, and it would be it examines (yes, the beyond-the-movies SW world does have a poor fiction (and boring for me to write it) if they were. You have great deal of subtlety and uncomfortable areas) than write to explore how real people think, and my characters aren't black something hailed as a masterpiece of arcane literature that's and white - you can't get much more murkily grey than having bought by four professors of big words. I'm a jobbing writer, as I two protagonists who are a bent copper and a war criminal. The have been all my working life: it's how I eat. I've done my

6 September/October 2004 • Vector 237 fact that readers really like Shan and Aras is quite interesting given world-building at all, but what happens is that I get an idea - what they've done in their pasts. Eddie the journalist is the usually when something makes me flaming mad - and then this everyman character because I needed that device in the story, but mass of apparently randomly collected data floods up to flesh it he does wrestle with his conscience about the nature of truth and out. I didn't know I was doing this at first. Then I realised that objectivity, which in retrospect is almost an internal story about even the Latin and Greek names I'd picked - at random, I thought the fiction process in itself. Yes, I do feel strongly that an author - for the warships in City of Pearl had thematic resonance with should ventriloquise ideas they don't support: that's how you the story. I was checking to make sure the names didn't have build real characters. It's also how you go to places that are scary unfortunate connotations (one of those things you learn the hard and demand a lot of you as a writer. You should never be way in public relations) and found the myths they related to were comfortable with the ideas you examine; you should be able to there in the plot. All I can assume is that those myths came up in push yourself into a persona that thinks things you don't, or even my Latin and Greek classes long ago and I absorbed them and things you find repellent, and make them real for the reader. Then forgot them. I used to be a terminal planner when it came to they can decide what and who they believe. fiction but once I knew my subconscious could provide that I confess that I'm amazed by the number of times I've heard material, I let it have a free rein. One day, the fact that a mouse people say, for example, that a certain writer advocates genocide contains thirty calories is going to be pivotal in a story. I can feel it because he had a character who committed it. Look, it's just coming. fiction. Maybe he does, and maybe he doesn't, but in the end he I think a lot of the complexity and feeling of immersion that was just telling a story, not advocating a lifestyle. Fiction would looks like conventional world-building in my fiction is in fact the be pretty anodyne if we couldn't write from radically diverse characters. My fiction is wholly character-driven. I spend a lot of perspectives, and if you do that then you're obliged to make a time on them, far more than I do on the plot, which sorts itself out proper job of it: no half measures. You have to show why that in the same way that the world-building does. I know where the world view makes perfect sense for that character. story starts and ends, I write the opening scene Babylon 5 did it very well: look at Londo and and the end scene, and then I go back and put G'kar. What a double act. I still don't know who in a few plot pivot pegs and then fill in the gaps. was right. The characters tell me where to head. I'm used to writing both sides of an argument Research is another thing entirely. I'm not at without comment and leaving it up to the reader; the Benford end of hard sf, but I do my research, this is what I mean by reportage, and I think that's and that's another hack habit. Okay, I'm really the bedrock of my writing. Now, I think probably borderline Asperger's to start with, but Lindsay Neville is an unsympathetic character, chasing facts is the thrill of the chase for a personally, but many readers just love her, journalist. While it's probably overkill, I have because she says what many people think and this horror of having someone come up to me at screws up in believable ways - for her, anyway. a con and tell me that fact X isn't so, and what Whether they'll still love her in Crossing The Line am I going to do about it? So when I do nuclear I don't know. weapons, I ask boffins at Los Alamos to check Propaganda has no place in fiction. Readers the copy. When I do orbital re-entry, I ask spot it a mile off, and as an ex-spin doctor, I can someone who's worked on the space shuttle. As say that it's also pretty sloppy to do it so that my first news editor told me - when in doubt, readers can see the strings. Like I said, all I do is leave it out, or check twice with people who shine a torch into a dark cupboard and say, “Take really know the subject. a look at that. What d'you think?” I've also tried to reflect reality I only have one way of working and that's to churn. A short is without moralising. Some companies do very bad things. Some a day's work and a novel takes me between eight and twelve scientists fake data and plagiarise their colleagues. Some bad weeks. I don't know any other way to do it: either a story flies coppers do bad things to even worse people. There are no saints straight away or it doesn't, in which case I drop it and move on. I and no demons in real life, just messy mixes of the two. do four thousand or five thousand words a day but I can do ten Speaking of the ventriloquising effect, some people have read thousand if everything is in place and I don't stop to check stuff “An Open Prison” as my personal statement that I think victim and re-plot. involvement in sentencing is wrong. Boy, are they way off beam. And I always have a notebook with me, 24/7. I keep one by It's just a story about a character who realises revenge can't make the bed because I have insights, plot solutions and off-the-wall her feel better, but can't forgive either. I'm just the reporter. And I ideas just before I fall asleep. And I wake up several times a night don't agree with my protag at all, but it's her story, not mine. with ideas and lines too. I also collect speech patterns. I paused AMB: City of Pearl is very complex, with at least three alien for a few moments by a construction site the other day just to pick races, a future Earth society - in fact, societies - and an Earth up the banter between the workmen, which was delightful stuff. colony society. How much more work is the world-building for a Dialogue matters to me. I hear my characters: I don't see them. I novel than a short story? Even something short like your see the environment around them and the action they're involved alternative chocolate story feels like it must have a lot of in, but not what they look like. development behind it. AMB: There are several points when a human is punished by KT: Umm... “Chocolate Kings” was written for a bet at Clarion, another race for offending their ethics - obviously one of the when a chum challenged me to get the thorny issue of real scientists in City of Pearl, there’s also someone handed over in chocolate into a story. No development, I'm afraid. It just came one of the short stories who ends up doing some kind of straight out in a few hours, and that's the way I write. I hate to community service as I recall. For that matter there’s the body repeat myself, but it's a journo habit. You never have the luxury of suit electronic tagging in “An Open Prison". Would you say the time. golden rule, of treating others as you would be treated, is I think there's a difference in technique between world­ something you’ve ended up exploring, without offering simplistic building and research. When I see the amount of world-building answers? people do for their novels, I have to admit that I seem to do very KT: Yes, and it's about realising the consequences of what you're little. But - and here's that journalist in me again - I have a brain doing. We're all too often unconnected to the consequences of like flypaper. I suck in apparently useless facts without noticing what we do and the way we live, from the dangerous insularity of and recycle them involuntarily all the time. So I feel as if I do no driving in a cocoon of a car to where our waste goes.

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It's also about exploring the really intense emotions that we Personally, I think the idea of exchanging responsibilities for have. Revenge: will it really make you feel better? Personally, I'd the right not to suffer is bogus sophistry. With animals, it's our go for it with a pickaxe, but some of my characters do and find it responsibility not to harm them because we're supposed to be doesn't help. Does intent and motive matter? That's a big theme smart enough to find ways to avoid it. in all the wess'har wars books, because the wess'har don't care AMB: There’s been much talk of a boom in British sf at the what you think or say, only what you do. “I didn't mean to hurt moment, although arguably its moment has passed. Do you feel you," cuts no ice with a wess'har, and that has its own dodgy part of it? logic loops. We live in a society where pleas in mitigation make a KT: No, definitely not. I don't feel I fit in the UK sf scene at all, but difference to how we feel about the perpetrator. No, I don't offer I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I'm a woman writing simplistic answers, because there aren't any. traditional hard sf (well, that's how the US classes The best you can do is let the reader have a One day, the me) and that's not something you see much in think about what the answer might be for the bookstores here. (Not that I think there's such them, and - more importantly - that it might fact that a mouse a thing as women's sf/f - I don't think gender be different for someone else. makes a blind bit of difference and most readers AMB: It seems to get harder and harder to contains thirty don't give a stuff what you are.) I just looked draw the line between human and non­ along the bookstore shelves when I first did my human. How far would you extend rights - calories is going market research and realised all the women and how far should they be dependent on writing in my preferred area were first published corresponding responsibilities? There’s an to be pivotal in a in the US, not the UK. You follow the money. anti-vivisection thread running through City story. The best way I can describe it is that I feel like of Pearl and a distaste for gene sequences as an ex-pat working in North America. Despite the economic commodities which could be in-yer-face English nature of my fiction, some translated into a suspicion of, say, some of the GM crop readers don't realise I'm English anyway. corporations. AMB: What are the remaining novels in the City of Pearl KT: The fictional philosopher Targassat in City of Pearl sums it up sequence? What’s next on the five year plan after those? as 'those who can make the most choices must accept the most KT: Crossing The Line is out on October 26 (same day as Republic responsibilities'. I don't think rights for non-human animals can be Commando: Hard Contact) and I'm just finishing the third book in dependent on responsibilities, because we've put other species in the trilogy, The World Before. Needless to say, I have quite a few a position where we pretty well control what happens to them, more wess'har wars books on the drawing board, and some either by direct action, as in food animals, or indirectly, by standalones, one of which is (gasp) a fantasy, but a Traviss sort of impacting the environment of wild species. This is like hanging a fantasy, which means it's a political parable and there ain't no monkey for being a spy. (Sorry, Hartlepool, but you did do it, dragons or unicorns in it, no sirree. I don't know yet if I'll be didn't you?) This idea is in a short of mine, “Suitable for the going straight into the next run of the wess'har wars or fitting in a Orient", where the army officer Da Silva says you can either standalone: that's up to HarperCollins, and of course the sales of punish the native species as people, in which case you have to the first trilogy. And there could well be more media tie-ins... treat them like people in other areas, or you have to accept AMB: I’ll look forward to them. Even the tie-ins... Thank you they're animals and they can't be guilty of breaking human laws very much indeed. and codes. "Death, Taxes and Mackerel", which was actually a © Andrew M. Butler and Karen Traviss 2004. humour piece, looks at this too: the dolphin argues that he's sentient and wins his case to be released, but then he has to work Karen Traviss's website is www.karentraviss.com and her books for a living and pay his taxes. may be ordered via the Amazon link on the BSFA website — Eds.

AS PART OF THE CONTINUING EXAMINATION OF THE BRITISH NEW WAVE, HERE'S A PIECE ON ONE OF THE KEY SHORT STORIES OF THE PERIOD Lines and Circles: A Look at Pamela Zoline’s 'The Heat Death of the Universe’ by Andrew M. Butler

here is a moment in one of Spalding Gray's monologues1 energy is lost through the process of work and less energy is when he offers an image for understanding entropy and available within the system. Through metaphor this becomes thermodynamics. Imagine a deck of cards - fifty-two cards translated into the mechanism of the universe running down, and Tplus two jokers - ordered by suit, Ace to King. Toss the pack thein emergence of disorder - once we might have said chaos - the air and they scatter, landing across the room. This took very within the universe. Such a metaphor of entropy appears central little effort, just a flick of the wrist and the opening of the hand. to the British New Wave; indeed Colin Greenland even called his But to return the pack to its pristine, regimented order would take book on the subject The Entropy Exhibition. Greenland writes that a great deal of work, of tracking the cards down, gathering them the authors gathered together by Michael Moorcock for New together, turning them the right way up where necessary, and Worlds "were occupied with a newer theme: entropy. They saw sorting them into the correct combination. This can be taken as a the degeneration of energy as a fit image for the disintegration of metaphor for the way the universe works, of the process of it society and the individual consciousness"2 Such degeneration can running down, with more energy being required to maintain order be seen throughout the work of writers such as Brian Aldiss, and less to allow disorder to develop. Sooner or later there will be Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard during the 1960s, with no more usable energy in the universe: we will reach the heat varying responses such as mourning, decadent indifference and death of the universe. encouragement. Entropy cannot be fought, or defeated. At best it Entropy is the measure of energy unavailable to do work can be held at bay. within a system, work here being defined as the movement of M. John Harrison, a writer associated with New Worlds in his mass through space. Because no mechanism is entirely efficient, early career, said in an interview that the metaphor of entropy:

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“had been developed and delivered by maybe fifteen of us across the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first three of the ten or twelve years. To be frank, I'm not entirely sure we twentieth, such as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. For understood what entropy was in a scientific sense, anyway. Fred Pfeil - who admittedly has a problematic conception of the Running down is only half of entropy. There's a whole lot more to New Wave10 - it was the moment when the genre “briefly it than the simple looking around and saying, 'Well, all these becomes modernist".11 Is science fiction here the country cousin, things are broken - we must be in an entropic situation'. I was limping along sixty years after the fashion, in the mainstream's kind of bored with it”.3 cast-offs? As Roger Luckhurst notes, this is genre history as “a But back in 1967, New Worlds published a short story which series of hierarchical stages through which, shamefaced, SF must embraced the concept of entropy and ideas surrounding drag itself, belatedly arriving behind the more advanced."12 thermodynamics, in order to narrate a day in the life of its central In 'Heat Death...' we have a break with linear narrative, told character, an allegedly happy but actually very distressed in a kaleidoscope of styles from the Ladies' Home Journal to housewife named Sarah Boyle, who is trying to maintain order physics lecture. Are these diverse elements, nearly fifty years after and prepare a birthday party for one of her children. Pamela Eliot, fragments shored against Sarah Boyle's ruin? And is the Zoline's 'The Heat Death of the Universe' appeared in New underlying narrative, of the dissatisfied housewife preparing for a Worlds 173 (July 1967) and has been reprinted a number of times party - what a lark! - a throwback to Virginia Woolf's Clarissa but, as Elizabeth Hewitt has noted “she has been ignored by the Dalloway's preparations for her party? critics in recent years”.4 One of the few women to be involved in It might also be worth suggesting that the metaphor of the British New Wave - Greenland notes Carol Emshwiller, advancement, of progress, is back to front. The British New Wave Eleanor Arnason, Gwyneth Cravens and Joanna Russ as other might be seen as a fall from grace, another decadent step down in contributors to New Worlds, along with occasional editor Hilary a genre which is already bastardising mainstream literature. It was Bailey5 - Zoline's output in science fiction has once possible to represent the world, and tell a been slim to date. Her collection, Busy About story, but no longer. Our authors are no longer the Tree of Life and Other Stories (1987), pulls It might be able to act as authorities, and leave incidents together five stories between 'Heat Death...' worth suggesting dangling in a morass of uncertainty. Perhaps. and “Instructions for Exiting this Building in In 'Heat Death...' we have fifty-four Case of Fire" (1985, from the anthology that the numbered sections (fifty-two cards and two Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female jokers?), ranging in length from ten words to a Mind), as well as the previously unpublished metaphor of page. The numbering implies some sense of title story. In addition, she edited two issues of linearity, perhaps even some concept of seniority, Ronald Reagan: The Magazine of Poetry advancement, of but it would probably be possible to read the (1968) with John Sladek and wrote a story in any order, ticking off sections as you... children's book, Annika and the Wolves progress, is back progress. The easiest course is to follow the (1985). She is also an artist (she did the cover to front. numerical advancement, as anything else would for Busy About the Tree of Life, and some take more effort, more energy. The sections give artwork for New Worlds) and playwright. a sense at first glance of an attempt to organise, to The generic status of her collected stories is disputed. In her tidy up the world and thus fight against entropy, but the very review of the book, Gwyneth Jones notes, “The publisher's blurb randomness of subject matter, the repetition, the additional places Zoline's collection firmly outside the genre, and perhaps numbering of the scientific and encyclopaedic inserts (on entropy, rightly, even though each of the stories either reconsiders a classic on the heat death of the universe, on light, on Dada [which takes sf theme or else is straightforwardly set in the future",6 although it us back to modernism], in love, on Weiner on entropy and on does in fact allow 'Heat Death...' to be a classic science fiction turtles) work against this. story. But 'Heat Death...' has been dismissed by some science Sarah Boyle's disintegration is connected to her Sysiphian fiction readers “as feminist polemic, a bitter personal denunciation attempt to maintain order in her house: of the wife-and-mother trap."7 Putting to one side the notion that Cleaning up the kitchen. Sarah Boyle puts the bowls, plates, feminist polemic cannot be science fiction, there is also a sense glasses and silverware into the sink. She scrubs at the stickiness that the story of 'Heat Death...' - a woman preparing for a party - on the yellow-marbled formica table with a blue synthetic cannot be science fiction. Science fiction is, after all, about man sponge, a special blue which we shall see again. There are and his status in the universe. Mark Rose describes it as “An marks of children's hands in various sizes printed with sugar interesting piece of fiction, and one that clearly gains resonance and grime on all the table's surfaces. The marks catch the light, and impact by having been published in a context of science­ they appear and disappear according to the position of the fiction expectations."8 'Heat Death...' is science fiction when observing eye. The floor sweepings include a triangular half of published in New Worlds, because it is expected that New toast spread with grape jelly, bobby pins, a green Band-Aid, Worlds would publish science fiction; it might be science fiction flakes, a doll's eye, dust, dog's hair and a button.13 in Busy About the Tree of Life if you come to the volume expecting science fiction - but a less tuned-in reader has not been The extended listing of her routine - expanded on in other fully briefed by the publisher. The reader might be confused by sections - demonstrates the amount of energy it is necessary to what Colin Greenland labels “the language of the Ladies' Home expend to maintain order, and thus metaphorically demonstrates Journal, perhaps",9 but such language in a Women's Press entropy at work. paperback should hardly be taken at face value. Boyle's attempts to keep order break down in other ways than In form the story fits in with the experimentation of the New just the loss of energy; she attempts to label her world: Wave: the multiple viewpoints of Brian Aldiss's Report on Probability A (1968, written 1962), the condensed novels which Sometimes she numbers or letters the things in a room, writing led to J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), the collage of the assigned character on each object. There are 819 separate moveable objects in the living-room, counting books. Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books, John Sladek's short Sometimes she labels objects with their names, or with false stories as forms, and Thomas Disch's flirtation with Oulipo in names, thus on her bureau the hair brush is labelled HAIR stories such as 334 (1972). The formal experimentation of the BRUSH, the cologne, COLOGNE, the hand cream, CAT. She is British New Wave is often held to be evidence of science fiction passionately fond of children's dictionaries, encyclopedias, embracing of techniques more associated with the modernists of ABCs and all reference books, transfixed and comforted at their

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simulacra of a complete listing and ordering.14 which is lost to the atmosphere as N2. The ammonia which Boyle can smell - presumably from some of the chemicals she uses for The futile quest for complete orderliness and clear labelling cleaning - is thus part of the on-going cycle of life and death. recalls the Borgesian map as big as the kingdom, the model at 1:1 Circles and cycles dominate Boyle's life: the daily drudge of scale. The invocation of "simulacra" anticipates Jean Baudrillard's domesticity, of fighting to regain ground lost to untidiness, even of notion of the copy without an original, the Disneyfication of the the monthly cycle of fertility. The annual birthdays which result world: from conceptions. The various clocks in the house. The image of the snake swallowing its own tail. Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the 'real' Juxtaposed with the nitrogen cycle motto is another reference country, all of 'real' America, which is Disneyland [...] to a circle: "On the wall by the washing machine are Yin and Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us Yang signs, mandalas". (Pause on the washing machine - would it believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and have been an automatic, complete with a rounded window? the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of Almost certainly it would have had some rotating mechanism or the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a spinner, and the machine goes through a cycle.) The Yin-Yang false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the mandala, a black and white circle shaped like two nested fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.15 commas, represents the two complementary forces of Taoist thought. Yang is also represented by an unbroken yarrow stick Boyle can no longer guarantee the connection of word to image, (compare the divination/oracle of the I Ching), and stands for of signifier to signified, can connect nothing with nothing. She white, masculine, active, north, sun and so on, and Yin, the cannot even be certain of her precise number of children - one of broken stick, stands for black, feminine, passive, south, earth and the biggest crimes in a patriarchal society. so on. Of course, appropriately, Disney's theme park is in California, Within western thought, the values associated with Yang the state where Boyle has ended up, a state which seems to be the would be held to be superior, and the Yin values recall apotheosis both of America and Western civilisation. She perceptions of the Orientals - in part north Africans and the imagines California infecting the rest of the world: people of Middle East, but by extension the Far East. Whilst Taoist parable appear to valorise these by showing the power of Sarah Boyle imagines a whole world which has become like passivity, the paradox is that passivity becomes an active strategy. California, all topographical imperfections sanded away with the The secret of happy life is balance between opposing states; in the sweet-smelling burr of the plastic surgeon's cosmetic polisher, a words of Chuang Tzu: world populace dieting, leisured, similar in pink and mauve hair and rhinestone shades. A land Cunt Pink and Avocado Green, he who wants to have right without wrong, brassiered and girdled by monstrous complexities of Super Order without disorder, Highways, a California endless and unceasing, embracing and Does not understand the principles transforming the entire globe, California, California!16 Of heaven and earth... They are correlative19

Boyle also compares Western civilisation to cancer, metastasising It fact at the extremes, an impulse turns into its opposite: within across the world, and a few sections there is a description of her that white comma of Yang, there is a small black circle, mother-in-law's neighbour, whose body is riddled with cancer: representing Yin and within that black comma of Yin, there is a "never had a day's illness in her life until the cancer struck, and small white circle, representing Yang. It might be that Boyle's now she is, apparently, failing with dizzying speed. The doctor distress comes from her inability to accept her role as an oasis of says her body's chaos, chaos, cells running wild all over".17 The Yin within the all-embracing Yang of California. (Does her maiden entropy strikes at the level of the narrative, the universe, the name of Sloss point toward Schloss, the German word for castle, world, the house, the body, the cell. castles being protected spaces often under attack from external However, it might be a mistake to see the story as purely forces?) downbeat. After all, in the classic New Wave disaster novels of Boyle is not from California, having grown up in Boston and J.G. Ballard, the endings are not necessarily pessimistic. Walking Toledo, so Zoline has given her a broadly westward trajectory. into the lagoon, into the south, at the end of The Drowned World The landmass of North America is at the west of the Western (1962) or The Drought (1964), is some kind of psychic fulfilment. world, and California is the west coast of western civilisation - the The Ballardian New Wave hero conspires with his own fate - next significant land travelling west being the Far East in our perhaps Sarah Boyle does the same in her embracing of orderly Eurocentric cartography. The western lands are the land of the disorder. dead, the necropolis of Cairo is built on the west bank, the west is But the linearity of entropy are, if not balanced with, then set the opposite of east and the direction of salvation for churches... It against versions of homeostasis, exchange and constants. Sarah is maximum Yang and apparently all conquering: Boyle's surname, the wedding gift of her husband, seems likely to be an allusion to Robert Boyle and Boyle's Law. In this law the Until we reach the statistically likely planet and begin to relationship between a gas's pressure and volume is constant; as converse with whatever green-faced teleporting denizens the pressure increases the volume decreases and so forth. thereof - considering only this shrunk and communication- More telling perhaps is the reference to the nitrogen cycle: ravaged world - can we any more postulate a separate culture? Viewing the metastasis of Western Culture it seems "On the fluted and flowered white plastic lid of the diaper bin she progressively less likely.20 has written in Blushing Pink Nitetime lipstick a phrase to ward off fumey ammoniac despair. 'The nitrogen cycle is the vital round of There may come a time when another culture, another race is organic and inorganic exchange on earth. The sweet breath of the encountered, which may counter the west; in 1967, it seemed Universe.'"18 To simplify, some nitrogen (or N2) is extracted from likely that patriarchal, multinational capitalism would win out, the atmosphere by nitrogen fixing bacteria or Cyanophyta (blue­ and for just over thirty years this has continued to seem likely, green algae), leading eventually to the presence of nitrates in the especially with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. There remains the soil. The nitrates are absorbed by plants which build them up into vast market of China to be assimilated, and the jury is out over the organic compounds; the plants die or are eaten by animals, and response of some sections of Islamic culture(s)... The (economic) the waste in time returns to the soil. Bacteria in the soil can then heat death of the universe is not yet reached, history has not yet turn the residue into inorganic nitrogen compounds, some of stopped - or if it had stopped, it is going again.21

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If Earth is a closed system, then in the long term patriarchal, Life. Foundation 43 (1988): 95. multinational capitalism will win (but then collapse for lack of 7. Gwyneth Jones, 96. new markets) - so the system cannot be allowed to be closed. In 8. Mark Rose. Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction. parallel to this, entropy will only become total if the universe is a (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981): 1; quoted in Elizabeth Hewitt, 290. closed system: 9. Colin Greenland, 61. 10. For details see Andrew M. Butler. ‘Modelling Sf: Fred Pfeil’s The total entropy of any isolated system [...] must either increase Embarrassment’. Foundation 72 (1998): 81. (irreversible process) or remain constant (reversible process). 11. Fred Pfeil. Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern The total entropy of the Universe therefore is increasing, tending Culture. (London and New York: Verso, 1990): 85-86. towards a maximum, corresponding to complete disorder of the 12. Roger Luckhurst. ‘The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic’. particles in it (assuming that it may be regarded as an isolated Science Fiction Studies 21: 1 (1994): 362. system.)22 13. Pamela Zoline. ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’. In: Busy About the Tree of Life and Other Stories. (London: The Women’s Press, 1988): 52 So to avoid her very own heat death, Boyle has to look outside (Section 11). the closed system of the house, must forget her domestic life: 14. Pamela Zoline, 53-54 (Section 15). 15. Jean Baudrillard. Simulations. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983): 25. There must be more than this, Sarah Boyle thinks, from time to 16. Pamela Zoline, 52 (Section 12). time. What could one do to justify one’s passage? Or less 17. Pamela Zoline, 61 (Section 38). ambitiously, to change, even in the motion of the smallest mote, 18. Pamela Zoline, 53-54 (Section 14). the course and circulation of the world?23 19. Chuang Tzu, translation from Thomas Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. (New York: New Directions, 1977): 88. 20. Pamela Zoline, 52 (Section 12). She has, presumably, to leave her husband, her children, her 21. See Francis Fukuyama. The End of History and the Last Man. home. Or at least be defined by more than just those elements. A (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1992). radical thought; one anticipating feminist thinking of the late 22. Pamela Zoline, 53 (Section 13). 1960s and the 1970s. Feminist polemic as science fiction? This is 23. Pamela Zoline, 61 (Section 44). how the world would have to be. 24. Pamela Zoline, 65 (Section 54). As it is, we seem to leave Boyle co-operating in her heat death, co-operating with curves (parabolas) and ovals (not circles): Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). She begins to break glasses and dishes, she throws cups and Bould, Mark. ‘Old, Mean and Misanthropic: An Interview with M. John cooking pots and jars of food, which shatter and break, and Harrison’. Vector: The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction spread over the kitchen. The sand keeps falling, very quietly, in Association 226 (2002): 5-10. the egg timer. [...] She picks up eggs and throws them into the Butler, Andrew M. ‘Modelling Sf: Fred Pfeil’s Embarrassment’. Foundation 72 (1998): 81. air. She begins to cry. She opens her mouth. The eggs arch Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. slowly through the kitchen, like a baseball, hit high against the (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1992). spring sky, seen from far away. They go higher and higher in the Greenland, Colin. The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the stillness, hesitate at the zenith, then begin to fall away slowly, British 'New Wave' in Science Fiction. (London: Routledge and Kegan slowly, through the fine clear air.24 Paul, 1983). Gray, Spalding. Swimming to Cambodia: The Collected Works of Spalding In Ballardian logic this would be the embracement of fate, the Gray (London: Picador, 1986). heading for the end of the line. A victory, in disaster in fact. But Hewitt, Elizabeth. ‘Generic Exhaustion and the Heat Death of Science perhaps Boyle needs to break away from that path. Fiction’. Science Fiction Studies 21: 3 (1994): 289-301. Jones, Gwyneth. ‘Review of Pamela Zoline, Busy About the Tree of Life’. Notes Foundation 43: (1988): 95-98. 1. Terrors of Pleasure: The House (1988). This element does not appear Luckhurst, Roger. ‘The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic’. in the book version, Swimming to Cambodia: The Collected Works of Science Fiction Studies 21: 1 (1994): 358-366. Spalding Gray (London: Picador, 1986). Merton, Thomas. The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. (New York: 2. Colin Greenland. The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the New Directions, 1977). British 'New Wave' in Science Fiction. (London: Routledge and Kegan Pfeil, Fred. Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Paul, 1983): 10. Culture. (London and New York: Verso, 1990). 3. Mark Bould. ‘Old, Mean and Misanthropic: An Interview with M. John Rose, Mark. Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction. (Cambridge: Harrison’. Vector 226 (2002): 5. Harvard University Press, 1981). 4. Elizabeth Hewitt. ‘Generic Exhaustion and the Heat Death of Science Zoline, Pamela. ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’. In: Busy About the Tree Fiction’. Science Fiction Studies 21: 3 (1994): 300. of Life and Other Stories. (London: The Women’s Press, 1988): 50-65. 5. Colin Greenland, 35. © Andrew M. Butler 2004. 6. Gwyneth Jones. Review of Pamela Zoline, Busy About the Tree of

CONTINUING OUR EXAMINATION OF THE NEW WAVE, STEVE SNEYD TAKES A LOOK AT POETRY IN NEW WORLDS Lining the Mind’s Inside: The New Worlds poetry revolution by Steve Sneyd

hen Michael Moorcock, since May/June 1964 editor of Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, saw the poetry activity “centred New Worlds, began using poetry in 1966, he was not on New Worlds and the New-Wave writers in the UK during the the first to include it in a prozine, Weird Tales, Fantasy late 1960s" as making possible today’s widespread presence of Wand Science Fiction, and many others having used genre poetry in magazines and anthologies. verse, albeit mainly as filler. However, Moorcock’s attitude to use What, then, was so revolutionary about Moorcock’s approach? of the form was very different, with lasting impact. Indeed, In his own words "New Worlds promised ... a readership that American poet and critic Robert Frazier, writing in the would not skip poetry, that would give as much attention to the

11 Vector 237 • September/October 2004 poetry as anything else." Far from treating it as filler, “we were and 1979, to meaningfully delineate significant themes and prepared to run poetry over as many pages as we were stories." characteristics, in the process at least implicitly suggesting A second big difference was that most of the poets whose answers as to how far his hopes for the medium of poetry, in the work he used, often, indeed, inviting them to contribute, were context of his magazine, were in fact achieved. A caveat, from the 'mainstream'. Even where, as with Thomas M. Disch, incidentally, is necessary, as to the choice of poems to discuss, they were seen by readers as 'sf community' writers, their that inevitably this, to some degree at least, subjectively reflects relationship with the genre tended to the semi-detached. my personal opinions as to those which most interestingly retain Just as poetry's standing within New Worlds was much higher impact and ability to challenge. than its marginal situation in previous sf magazines, and its poets Before beginning to look at individual poems, it seems came, in general, from a very different source, so also the work's sensible, also, to briefly recall what was happening to New form diverged markedly from that to be found in earlier sf Worlds itself during the period concerned. Magazine format until prozines. Specifically, what appeared in New Worlds was almost #201, in April 1971 (from 1969 edited by various associates, entirely in forms - free verse, plus some concrete - established in rather than Moorcock himself) was followed by ten issues in poetry generally since the Modernist upheaval around World War original paperback anthology format: PBK #1 in 1971; PBK #2, I, but hitherto very rare in sf publications, where rhymed and PBK 3, PBK #4 in 1972 all Moorcock-edited; PBK #6 in 1973 metred verse, including such 'strict forms' as the sonnet, had edited by Moorcock and Charles Platt; then, edited by Hilary continued to dominate almost totally, whether in prozines Bailey, PBK #7 in 1974, PBK #8 and PBK #9 in 1975, PBK #10 in fanzines, or the occasional verse-using “sf little magazine." By 1976. After a hiatus, New Worlds resumed magazine format, from contrast, what little rhymed material appeared in New Worlds the last Moorcock-edited issue, #212 (1978), to several edited by was, with the rarest of exceptions, pastiche or parody within short others including Charles Partington, and Dave Britton of Savoy stories. Books, a final #216 in 1979. Fourthly, as with form, so with content: just as the prose of Moorcock's New Worlds diverged sharply from what was Peter Redgrove previously familiar to genre readers, instead, in general, sharing The first poems Moorcock used were by Peter Redgrove, who hallmark New Wave characteristics, so too the poetry. When died earlier this year. His 'The Case' in New Worlds #158 (1966) examining those differences of content, it is helpful to look at is epigraphed by a quote from Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf: what M. John Harrison said in his article, 'A Literature of "man ... is an experiment and a transition ... perilous bridge Comfort', in New Worlds paperback (hereafter abbreviated PBK) between nature and spirit. His innermost nature drives him on to issue #1 in 1971: although specifically discussing Ballard's work, the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to it has considerable applicability to much New Worlds poetry, as nature, the mother". The poem itself voices a schizophrenic's well as bringing out the degree to which, in New Worlds prose, a inner world, as changing urgings of his disorder reshapes the kind of "poemising" occurred, the resulting tendency to exterior phenomena of the garden he seems employed to tend, convergence with characteristics typical of contemporary modern into manifestations of dead mother and vanished father. poetry, i.e. “fragmentation and condensation" that “minimise the The five-page work reflects his inner turmoil's obsession with waste products of the story and leave the image - the essence of death and judgement, its attempts to raise the mother and the fiction - to stand by itself", in turn, liable to assist readers in summon and control the absent father/god figure. Yet it also coming to terms with New Worlds poetry itself. (He could have revels, as luxuriantly as a Douanier Rousseau painting, in the also noted in New Worlds prose further strategies familiar in thereness and multiplicity of the natural world, a theme which modern poetry, including lack of narrative closure, fragmented persists throughout Redgrove's subsequent writings. To the extent, telling, and unreliable narration.) Much New Worlds prose, also, thus, that it expresses a life-long poetic agenda, the piece can also is in part or whole mood fiction akin to prose be seen as allowing Redgrove, through the mask poetry. of persona, to voice his purpose and that of his Other Harrison remarks which can be ...Redgrove's craft. Indeed, how he sees what the poet should meaningfully applied to the nature and content of be is encapsulated in the line "A maker of much New Worlds poetry include “using the twin frequent self­ prayers, flowers, hypotheses", recalling the Hesse devices of sexuality and violence to examine and epigraph's reference to "experiment", and measure relationship with the exterior universe description as Redgrove's frequent self-description as "the (that relationship which, in fact, constitutes our “the scientist scientist of the strange". Yet, even though we inner universe)" and “fascination with the surrealist sense the identification of poet with persona, still analogy, the expression of an event or series of of the the latter retains its own individual power to events through an equation of emotionally-charged compel. "I will haul you in, father, through the objects". Harrison noted, too, how central a feature strange". bounds of my senses", it cries. At the last, after is “the optimum denizen of the psychiatric hospital the desperate outcry of such lines as "O shame ... neither doctor or patient, but both", adding “Fantasy is not just to die", and "To hear the peacock 'help'! that means no such round the corner. Neither is reality. The one stems from the other, thing," nevertheless there comes an all-acceptance - "And to live ... as inextricably woven as the lives of patient and doctor in the ... without judging, called 'Father'" having stepped beyond all- psychiatric ward." Exploration of such mental hinterlands is the seeing into all-being. The poem's quest-like traverse through very essence of much New Worlds poetry. imagined sensations, inner and outer, has thus achieved closure, Moorcock himself said "We ... wanted it to be essentially the protagonist becoming, and thereby silencing, that which had speculative ... imagistic, psychological ... poetry that contained so tormentingly judged, the presence-in-absence figure of some sort of extra idea ... avoiding banal cliches, a robot or father/god. A kind of peace is born within, to end an extraordinary something like that. highly familiar to the average reader of kind of creation myth, by no means the last such to appear in science fiction ..." In particular, in poetry as in prose, he New Worlds. welcomed imaginative explorations of inner space, the interior Redgrove was a thoughtful analyst of his own work, and the realm of the individual mind which the so-called 'soft sciences' newer genre writing generally. In a lengthy letter published in sought to understand, and begin to manipulate. another prozine, SF Impulse, in February 1967, Redgrove said "Sf These, then, were the aims Moorcock had for poetry in New has drawn very much on the information of the physical sciences Worlds. Now it is time to look at a sufficient selection of the work ... Poetry has drawn on the information of the 'personal' sciences; actually used during the thirteen years involved, between 1966 anthropology, psychiatry, psychology ... There are definite signs

12 September/October 2004 • Vector 237 that the two are meeting ... physics seems to say that the ultimate The apparently worthy aim of preventing a situation where the substrata of matter have psychological properties ... things cannot villains "remain always in power over the automata of the will­ be observed without the condition of the observer coming into it less”, has, clearly, the ironic subtext that deindividualising ... physics is more likely to be explained by biology than vice chemical dominance is the inescapable outcome, whichever versa ... the outer world of science and observation and the inner 'side' is 'victorious'. At one level at least, then the poem is a world of person and feeling meet in both sf and poetry ... the two parable of rivalry between opposed ways of reshaping a damaged halves of the modern mind have begun to unite in both mindscape: in effect, conventional stabilising medication versus disciplines”. the outlaw 'mind-expanding' drugs advocated by 1960s gurus as Redgrove's initial interest in psychological states might, R.D. Laing or Timothy Leary. incidentally, be traceable to a breakdown during National Service The scene is set in prose: "Attila, robot-knight of the which led to shock treatment, as Peter Porter noted in 'Peter psychiatric society,” must "unravel a knot in the star-system of Redgrove - a brief memoir' (in Poetry Review's Peter Redgrove inner space ... due to the imperialism of a drug ring, Special, 71:2/3, 1981). The poet's own published CV (1995) hallucinogenics unlimited”, by combating "their cult of speaks of “experience of Freudian analysis”, training "as a Jungian primitivism and ritual pity inspired by the virgin queen Madulla ... analyst with the psychologist and anthropologist Dr. John Layard” out of line with the normal sex-worship orientation of the Planet 4 and that, from 1969, he "practised psychology as a lay analyst”. Group('s) ruling clique, the Table Men”. In Poetry Review's Peter Redgrove Special, Porter also remarks The six-page-plus poem itself is divided into six sections, their in 'The Case' the presence of "one of Redgrove's perennial characteristic form very short stanzas, predominantly doublets and themes - the manner in which God goes on pilgrimage through triplets, made up of short enjambed lines. our bodies as we live out our lives.” Of "the most deep-rooted In Part One, 'The Call of Attila', the protagonist reports for source of Redgrove's poetry”, he mentions, alongside "the web of orders: "swallowed/his testosterones and was out,//a fine blaze of nature”, as in this poem "the psychic overworld of which religion, Nuremberg I in his gas-suit, at ease/I before the Table-men. A death, and, above all, sex are providers of co-ordinates”. In the million eggs/on a flat glass disc/reflecting/eyed him (the scent same issue, Anne Stevenson's 'A Responsible whispered, undulant/from the green orifice/below Joy' focuses the same point in a different way: ...poetry as a the glitter)”. "Ok, boss; Mein Fuehrer”: the "hero” "poetry as a way to mental freedom ... the responds, like a California private eye asserting responsibility of the poet (which begins, truly, in form of waking his independence, amid hints of his (or its) dreams) is to liberate and heal ... the 'wholing' personal quest agenda "ready/fryr a new grail/to process ... a loosening of consciousness from the dream, albeit be wrenched/out of the misery of the pitied.” straitjacket of habitual thought.” In Part 2, high-techly equipped for the Interviewed by Neil Roberts, in 'Science of under the mission: "man-womb of elaborate alloys/Planet 4 the Subjective' (in Poetry Review 77:2, June poet's control had long since riveted/to his watchbone ... 1987, Poetry & Science Special), Redgrove, contractible for a/vitamin pill ...//or expandable to describing poetry as a form of waking dream, as navigator... a space-ship”, Attila begins his journey: "Happy albeit under the poet's control as navigator, then ... four-fifths sexual fantasy as it was ... good//to made the point, relevant to much New Worlds poetry, that "It is be a robot, alone/and like a man again”. Yet there what we call our conscious minds which are the constructs. The is no real freedom from watchers, in this closed universe: poem comes from the interface between conscious and "outside, ... the piercing rays of the Table-men/... like the gray unconscious.” sisters,/ever circled”. In Poetry Review's Peter Redgrove special, again, Susan Next, in Part 3, he surprises celebrants honouring their Fromberg Schaeffer's 'Under the Chronoscope', an analysis of damaged saviour "a white child without arms/lifted out of the Redgrove's collection The Weddings at Nether Powers, expands mud//to a blazing Orion ". Duty overrides sympathy: "heresy/has on the point Redgrove had made in his SF Impulse letter about the got to be hurt”, especially its focus, "Medulla” her name the term importance of modern theories of physics to understanding, for the brain's innermost pith), "our Lady/of LSD .../against her saying how much his work responds to the disorientation of our right side, the/silver needle shone”. With Part 4, Attila, still reality view created by the counter-intuitive theorisation of suffering after-effects of overcoming Medulla sexually, both quantum science: "The unpredictability with which Redgrove vestiges of "intuition ... a fierce irritant” and "onset of rigor accelerates time or slows it down ... ineluctably leads him into sexualis mortis”, faces a further task: Androyeda, rock-chained like surrealistic techniques, which, given the poems' premises, are not her mythological near-namesake, needs help. In full private eye surreal, any more than the assertions of modern physics are mode - "Hold tight, sister - he cuts her free, just before, with Part surreal.” Anne Stevenson makes a related point, in analysing the 5, the inevitable monster arrives, "Pervasive as an echo”; despite difficulty Redgrove's work could present: whereas he tried "to distractions (Androyeda's "greedy buttocks/... open to man or show that what is (outside time and) archetypal and what is near beast”, then "the/circling Furies, the//whole bleak glass/in the at hand are inseparable into 'planes' ... we are in the habit ... of Planetarium of nothingness”), victory ensues:” The/thing is dead. thinking in planes not in cycles.” To strive against such habituated Filing its/biological structure//in the back pocket of his/archive- thinking is characteristically New Wave; that striving helps wallet, he lapses ... into a dream”, one undercutting apparent explain the disorientation, and resulting hostility, felt by many triumph. A Medusa-alike "Baleful Head” confronts him, "the thing extant sf readers encountering it. all needed. " Torment proves as recurrent as the eternal cycles of myth: "Attila ... hearing/the space-mind ... keening.//...

George Macbeth lifting/(drawing back the snake-hair)/the silver needle,//that pure The next year, the late George MacBeth's 'The Silver Needle' in beam of endless light ... blazed again/into the desperate circle of #1 70, one of the most memorable New Worlds poems, combined the damned”. the garishly colourful spectacle of space opera with the In another poem, 'The Crab Apple Crisis' (#168), MacBeth mythological bustle of a vast Victorian canvas (he subtitled the applies reductio ad absurdum to the bland euphemisms used, poem a "strip cartoon for Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones”), albeit then as now, by rulers to conceal horror from the populace, in this paradoxically confining both to a mind-interior. case then-Pentagon adviser Herman Kahn's banal-sounding There in inner space, a manufactured sentient must confront escalating steps to nuclear Armageddon. Applying the same rules, those who have introduced a new addiction beginning to rival a trivial dispute between suburban neighbours moves via Laurel that already sanctified by the prior controllers of this innerverse. and Hardy slapstick to tragic devastation. Of the same poet's 'The

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Soft World Sequence, 1 the sea 2 the clouds 3 the earth ', in Best nameless protagonist invades his own body; "He went into his Sf Stories from New Worlds 3, (1968) Moorcock remarks these side, he dug that tunnel" which "unrolled like a surgical glove"; poems were “inspired in part, he [MacBeth] says, by the imagery therein he unburies his mother, only to disavow her, then his of Thomas M. Disch's serial ... Echo Round His Bones [1967]". wife: when "He risked a look back", Orpheus-like, "She was quite The final response to the slow dissolution of everyday life's dead." Her body, chopped up, regenerates as many women who apparent solidity is a clinging to a traditional British response, "tended his every want". Amid a throng of sexual imagery, further apathetic resignation: "Let well alone,//I always say ./Take what creations occur from semen etc.; from their mutual destruction comes./You can't win them all. Not without being one of them arise two black women, who abandon him to mate with satyrs. yourself.” He is left alone, his creation having abandoned him: "He shivered at the entrance. It was getting dark./No one had come out yet." D.M. Thomas The Freud-influenced poems in #216 (1979) - 'Don This writer's poetry appearances in New Worlds were many Giovanni', 'The Woman to Sigmund Freud', and 'Fathers, Sons including 'The Head Rape', in #180; 'Two Voices' (#182); 'The and Lovers' later became important elements of Thomas's 1981 Hospital of Transplanted Hearts' (#186); 'The Spectrum' (#187); Booker Prize-nominee novel The White Hotel, (as the Mr Black 'Mr Black's Poems of Innocence' (#188); 'Labyrinth' (#189); poems did of another novel, Swallow, 1984), a compelling 'Apocrypha' (#199); 'Computer 70: Dreams & Love Poems' journey by a female psychiatric patient's journey from repression (machines, too, can have mental disorders) (#200); 'Sonoran and breakdown to a self-fulfilling wholeness consumed by the Poems' (PBK #5) (nine pages - a relationship with a 'noble Holocaust. savage'-like Mexican woman whose intercessionary beliefs, i.e. in kachina spirituality etc., heal a self divided between writing and Other British Poets being); 'Night-Marriage' (PBK #6); and three Freud-triggered A variety of other British poets (Americans will be discussed later) pieces in 216. As well as such free verse work, Thomas also appeared in various issues, among them, in #160 (1966) and #186 contributed concrete poetry (as also did Langdon Jones with (1968), the then-iconic counterculture figure, Bill Butler. His 'The 'Flower Gathering' (#192, July 1969) and 'Transplant'. First Gorilla on the Moon' is playful: "The gorillas are all Of the most notable Thomas New Worlds poems, 'The Head inside/quiet/Before the television/Why venture out ... you can't Rape', later much-anthologised, then become controversial when see a foot for the popcorn ... Our gorillanauts/must come out/To interpreted as exculpatory of male intra-relationship violence, (Len eat the popcorn ball." Hatfield, more neutrally, commented "powerfully charged ... Another was Robert Calvert, a lyricist (like Moorcock) for sexual violence ... brutalization") begins with a prose entry from pioneer spacerockers Hawkwind, creator of their Space Ritual an apocryphal 'future dictionary': the CHASTITY VEIL "First used rock opera. His elegiac 'Ode To A Time Flower' (PBK #5, 1973) in 2800", features "telepathy blocks (usually in the form of jewels epigraphed from Ballard's 'The Garden of Time', is four ten-line ... fixed to the critical points of the skull". In the narrative poem stanzas, rhyming ababccadda. Longingly - "Your calyx hides a that follows, five five-line stanzas plus a payoff line, a drunken nectary of time ... you turn/To crystalled pearl in my eyes" - the husband tears off the jewels to force his way into his wife's mind, poet seeks knowledge from the flower's "sacredness" of "How despite her pleas, learns of her abuse as a child, has "more Man is Angel on his way from slime". Yet "wary as Pandora", he terrible/revelations of times she'd lifted jewels fears the consequences: did not "the first man willingly". They become "two facing mirrors" as to reach out and stroke/The marijuana leaf "he re-/re-felt his lust, being carboned in her “I have remained condemn/Himself for greed when brain,/she re-refelt the hysteria/that he re-felt, so harvesting/And burning such a golden thing" he re-re-re-felt". The outcome is darkly uncertain; interested in the feeling himself akin to future "stoned explorers "Blood and black hairs on the ripped veil". Len mythic aspects of Medusa" who, facing a new planet, "stall ... Hatfield's further comment as to the poem's Before ... the petrific fog." reliance on "the myths of sf to emphasise of sf, but have In PBK #10 (1976), New Worlds published isolation and alienation" links to a single Calvert's haunting short poem 'the Naked and instance a wider reason for the poet's fascination moved away Transparent Man Gives Thanks', in strict rime with the genre. Indeed, Hatfield quotes Thomas royal form. "Amid entropic dwindle, Blakeian as saying "since then", [i.e. the publication of from 'pure' sf joy persists ... ruins of ages around me, Penguin Modern Poets 11, in 1968, also strewn/like wreckage of an unsuccessful including Redgrove's 'The Case': there Thomas into other areas Probe/among the craters of a wasted moon,/I introduced his all sf-themed, poems by saying of myth." extend my thanks for this living robe" (earlier "Some evolved from myths suggested by lines had hymned "this vermilion tapestry, science-fiction stories by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C warp and weft/of the blood-vein's fabric and its Clarke, Tom Godwin, Damon Knight and James H. Schmitz"] "I pulsing weave") "to the moth-holed globe,/and unravelling, have remained interested in the mythic aspects of sf, but have almost threadbare sky/of the failing sun". moved away from 'pure' sf into other areas of myth." Michael Butterworth, in some of whose novels Hawkwind Hatfield described 'Mr Black's Poems of Innocence', its title appear as future saviours, has poetry in #178 (1967); Christopher Blake-echoing, as "estranging material ... outward verbal answers Logue, later to rework the Iliad as modern technowarfare epic, in ... inner figurative musings" of a schizophrenic undergoing #181 (1968). Others represented include Barry Cole (#176, 1967), "operant conditioning therapy" (Moorcock noted "a lot of found Mike Evans (#183, 1968), R Glyn Jones, surrealist Paul Green material ... more than I realised at the time", from interviews with ('The Time Ship', #199, 1970), and, in #216, John Clute with 'For an actual psychiatric patient). As with 'The Case', 'The Silver the 29th Birthday Of A Friend.' Like the Americans discussed Needle' etc., in New Worlds as for the 1960s counter-culture later, all were male, to Moorcock's regret. more generally, like the Romantics long before, madness is seen as opening up new levels of consciousness. Libby Houston Thomas's six-page 'Night-Marriage' is a violent creation myth, The sole exception, Libby Houston, had a genre connection via employing Jung-like reversionary archetypes (interestingly, the her illustrator husband, the late Mal Dean. New Worlds used five time-reversal trope also appears, in the lines "Smashing at his of her poems in #190 (1969), 'Out of Manoueuvres', 'Star', 'Alien days, minutes, years,/He grew younger/Every time he stopped to Pomp', 'The Old Woman and The Sandwiches', and 'At the Sign rest,/The tree that had burdened his back/shrank a little".) A of The Times', then three in PBK #8 (1975). Of these, 'Weather

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Clock', six stanzas each of four lines, is detached, timeless. A he feeds Alpha reflects increasing disillusion: pastiched fragments, woman observes her world: the windmill whose “sails/throw out a limerick on the perversity of poets, then lines, on the suicide of beams of light”, ambient sky, then purposeless male activity; “the a hack writer colleague, he describes to himself as “poetry. And bucket reaches neither parapet/nor (by his ease) water.” Her damn good journalism”. His final quoted lines fuel a devastating observer's detachment is haughty, superior - “I have compassed act of Alpha-sabotage: “Undepression covers me/I am filled with his trick./I have not shown myself/and need not speak”. 'Ghost unelation/I unhope for all save Death/And deathlong satiation”. Bread' is two four-line stanzas of low-key fear “nothing to taste or John T. Sladek, in 'The Poets of Millgrove, Iowa', shows touch or smell/but when you die, you will die lacking”. Again hometown joy at their hero's return via four doggerel lines - “He sinister, 'The Queen Lies Dying' (five stanzas; six, six, seven, four, comes back safe, to our greatest delight” etc. - recited just before ten lines) foreshadows palace murder within, “flies tease her the Astronaut's expletive-filled harangue shatters their welcome. bodice”, outside “News of the dire event/(which has not yet taken In PBK #1 (1971), M. John Harrison's Viriconium story, 'The place ...) brings/tears.” Lamia and Lord Cromis', has the latter chant “a bleak poem composed in the Great Rust Desert during winter”, seven lines, Poetry Within Stories In New Worlds laid out as prose: “metallic perspectives trammel us in the rare As well as alone, poetry appeared within New Worlds prose earth north ... swarf-eaters ... hardened by our addiction, tasting stories For instance, in Brian Aldiss's Acid Head Wars stories of a acids ... Little to dream here, our fantasies are iron and icy echoes youth crusade seeking salvation across a psychedelic-warfare- of bone ... Rust in our eyes, we who had once soft faces.” Later, polluted Europe, much text, thought-streams of drug-addled the Dwarf quotes eight seashanttyish lines from “a Rivermouth characters, is near-Joycean prose-poetry, while, in the 'Still song of forgotten meaning, The Dead Freight Dirge”: “Burn them Trajectory' episode, two pages are actual verse, a girl up and sow them deep,/Oh drive them down!” schizophrenic's interior dialogue with her absent father. In PBK #5 (1973), feminists in Emma Tennant's 'The Crack' Poetry is found, too, in Langdon Jones's 'The Eye of The Lens', shard rock lyrics to liberation song: “Our time is come/The River in #179, 1968, the author explaining in his introduction to The is broken/Tell Laura I love her/Our Oppression is Ended/Blue Eye of the Lens (collection 1972, 1980) that this replaced suede shoes”. John Clute's 'The Disinheriting Party' extracts Dyke­ “excerpts from Messiaen's own text to ... the Trois Petites Smashers' cult ritual: “eyes ... buttered with Thalassos,/The Liturgies” he was not allowed to use. Arson in a mental hospital garment falls, the heart rips,/... interstitial sweat with the begins this meditation on how, focused by the burning lens of moon/Spoils Euclid and the moon drips”. insanity, fire metaphors such universals as creative love and In PBK #7 (1974) Eleanor Arnason, in 'The Warlord of Saturn's liberating worship. 'The Coming of the Sun' section includes Moons', has a city-trapped writer sfnally parody country music poems and prose poems, the last leading into a visual poem, “Carry me back to Titan,/That's where I want to be./I want to words located round an octopus-armed sun. 'Soleil de Sang, repose/On the methane snows/At the edge of a frozen sea.” d'oiseaux' (sixteen lines, three stanzas) anthropomorphises fire as Michael Moorcock's Dancers At The End of Time series, too, love object-cum-release: “Throw to me the lance of love, my uses song or verse material - in PBK #9 (1975) in 'Ancient Love/And I can look out through the layers of glass/Make of Shadows', mother and child time travellers from the far past hear yourself a cauldron for my heart ... Your golden pillars are singing the deceptive endtime city sing four verses of “Remember, to me/I am here in a cave in a house behind glass”. 'Dead Book Nalorna, remember only the Night!”, six lines each, e.g.: “so Images Spin In My Mind Like Snow', a prose-poem with rhymed many that are dead loved thee!/Slain like winged game that falls third 'paragraph', dashes its line breaks, again glorifies the beneath the hunter's shot./First they rose up, and then with limbs approaching danger in quasi-religious terms: “Sound waves of outspread, they drop'd:/Through fiery Day they plung'd, their glory put my soul to flight- The sun of blood is trembling on the bodies bright:/Stain'd bloody scarlet in the sun's sweet mourning bleeding snow- The colours of your love flux in a brilliant flow- light” etc., causing the adult visitor to comment: “Queen Your core of acquiescence swells in me.” Just seven lines, Sentimentality ruled here, too. The song is her testament.” Later, 'Catatonic Sun, Fill My Valleys' eroticises like a religious mystic - the city repeats, garbled to semi-verse, Maxims of the time­ “Sun-fire, my foetus fills me with heat ... Sun ... - my foliage travellers' home society. Then, in PBK #10, in 'Constant Fire', moves under/your hand,/Sun, you are piercing my womb” - while Emmanuel Bloom, the Fireclown, arrives to proclaim four boastful the twelve-liner 'This Is Sun', in turn, embodies this with direct lines, rhymed aabb, ending “I am your Doom, your Providence!”; physicality - “Sun is blood/And the bone, gouged and crackling ... later, in De Volospion's zoo of religious fanatics, he recites poetry Sun is semen/Ejaculated in a spurt of blood”. The final 'visipoem' to himself, seventeen pastiched Victoriana lines, rhymed aa bb cc - after further orgasmic and religion-echoing verbal content etc.: “And I beheld the hours/As maidens, and the days as around the sun illustration: “Ahhhh! PRAY//BuRST/reach/eros”, labouring men,/And the soft nights again/As wearied women to “veni,/veni,/creator/spiritus”, etc., comes the prosaic payoff - their own souls wed” etc. “There were no survivors”. Again in PBK #10, William Nabor's alternative Depression-era Again, Jones ended his pastiche of music biography in #182 story, '... As American As ...', includes incestuous Sister Anjou's (1968), 'Symphony No 6 in C Minor The Tragic by Ludwig Van verses, such as “... Thus we go down with the cotton mill Beethoven II', with the lengthy soul journey-cum-dialogue poem colic./Thus we all suffer, grow ragged and worn./Oh, though I by the fictive Totenfreund the supposed symphony set. walk in the steps of a demon,/I dare that demon be other than me In #168, Peter Tate's 'The Thinking Seat', set on a near-future !/I will learn to praise our keeper,/Hoover, an aimless depression California coast, extracts sea-theme related poems the for me”; the protagonist's subversive PS to an official “thinko- beachcomber's leader Cogan 'improvises' to control; discovery graph” is also in verse, thirteen lines including “ ... when i've the verses are plagiarised from the Beats leads to his death. Two satiated my appetites physical,/i satiates my appetites, other stories in the same issue contain short poems. Poetry is mystical,/employed, i's a bureaucrack!/cut loose an anarchrist am again a plot element in Graham M. Hall's 'The Tennyson Effect': a i!/with a gutteral arts degree”. poet, Paul Windust (a symbolically loaded name), being used, at a secret establishment, to help activate Alpha, an Emotion machine American Poets In New Worlds designed for military dominance quotes lines which reflect his The presence of some American poets in New Worlds shows own emotional arc. Initially euphoric, as “the first extra-terrestrial awareness there of the Moorcock approach, even before Judith versifier” he writes “The sun sipped the Lake of Dreams/and the Merrill's England Swings SF Doubleday anthology of 1968 dust was wine”. Such lines, fed, amplified, into the Alpha device, introduced New Wave poetry as well as prose to a wider US give it “a poet's mind to the power of ten”. Gradually the material readership. However, the American first and most frequently

15 Vector 237 • September/October 2004 present in New Worlds, Thomas M. [Tom] Disch, lived in Britain 'Untitled', eight, thirteen, and four lines, posits "A lazy outpost when his poetry began appearing with 'The Flight of Daedalus' in war;/soldiers ... grow mutations/in the bellies/of dim-witted native #168 in 1966. This centre-justified “fragment of an abandoned girls", then, in a hospital where the sole voice is "a tape in the poem" of two stanzas, eighteen and four, contrasts "where the ceiling", an sfnally-described old man - "liver spots made his stars/are Doppler-red and speed/grows dizzy at the verge of c ... face/... a sepia map of Mars./Capillaries popped in his head/like shattering the crystal sphere" with "the dull perspective of the sea" starships landing" - do they connect? which as it recedes via a general concentricity/of elliptical Poet-editor Andrew Joron's long 'The Sonic Flowerfall of beads/pendant from the sun" appears to swallow also the cosmic Primes', in 1979's #216, is a complexly elegiac experimental saga vastnesses "until their utter dissolution" as "all/vanish into the of which Robert Frazier's contemporary review summary conveys equation" of above and below. Sardonically, the author comments at least one meaning-strand: "futuristic Neanderthals ... bend ear on writing-as-creation: "I create,/as a soldier detonates a mine, or to ... orbiting computerised intelligences anthopomorphised into ... poet/leaves the poem behind." gods ... yearning to tear them apart for their precious metals". 'A Vacation on Earth' followed, then, considerably later in Addicted listeners, the ostensible humans (or post-humans) below PBK #5, 1973, 'The Assassination of The Mayor', its twenty-two interpret as emotional contacts, love-songs, the communication of lines another madness-poem, of descent into urban paranoia the "male" of the orbital pair of orbital "golden solons" to its back­ "dreadful garbage/trucks ... grew louder every day, closer, up "female" unit: yet contemplate how "From a metal-poor harder/to deny, until even his dog was dead, Urban Life,/a Utopia" (neatly ironic) "We shall dismantle them", once shot dalmatian." "To distract himself, He'd ... read some boxes/of down after "missile hangars ... open rusty eyelids". Wishful breakfast food - everything else was pornographic". But the threat fantasy? Probably, given the groundlings' psychological takes on an individual face; "a crewcut/garbageman would smash dependence on the sounds they overhear, coupled with the the neck off/a bottle of California champagne and, likelihood that decayed surface technology, insofar as it still laughing/uncertainly, wrap his huge body in flag after flag." Even functions, controls them rather than the reverse. Yet what is illusions of escape are fearful: "He kept/dreaming of leaving his certain here? That "nightside lit with cities/zapping with bluest job and going to live in a house/surrounded by bulldozers energy/Binary citizenries" - distorted memory of when "we were somewhere in the woods./Instead, dammit, he was on fire." In sovereign", illusory wish-projection, or machine realm going New Worlds's final #216 Disch had the Whitmanesquely-titled indifferently about incomprehensible business? This work - Long 'Song of Myself'; he'd also used verse in a short story, 'The Eternal Poem winner in the 1980 Rhysling Sf Poetry Awards - whose Invalid', in PBK #10, quoting Get Well card verses, by readers, facing the ultimate unknowability of Joron's far-future hypochondriac writer Allbard, which "Within five minutes" witnesses, also sensed the ambiguity inherent in all poetic caused " ... a bowel movement in rhymed couplets"! testimonies, ends the story of poetry in New Worlds on an Established sf poet David Lunde had a poem in #179, in appropriately speculative note. As with other poems discussed March 1968, while in PBK #5, 'Walking Backwards', (Disch had here, it bears out critic Vivien Rowarth's view of the essence of heard author Philip Lopate read this in New York), eight stanzas, New Worlds poetry, "an illusionary picture of reality that becomes five, five, seven, four, four, five, six, four lines, is vivid short-term part of us". time reversals, experienced by things. "newspapers to the typewriter keys' chapped lips,/the paper to the tree, crying and Sources: holding tight,/the maple syrup shuffling its feet up the bark", then In addition to issues of New Worlds and other items indicated at by people: e.g. "The wall-eyed security guard .../returns to appropriate places in the text: Frazier, Robert, 'Poetry', in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 2nd Edn, where/his eyeballs first began to pull apart"; lovers go "from John Clute & Peter Nicholls, eds., (London: Orbit, 1999). climax to foreplay", the parachutist is "faltering and stretching his Frazier, Robert, 'Touch of British' [review of New Worlds #216, neck/like a turtle, not knowing which way is up." Finally, September 1979], Star*Line 3:2 (1980). wistfully, human and non-human time returns conjoin "the beef Hatfield, Len, 'D.M. Thomas', Guide to 20th Century Science Fiction would get its intestines back/and I ... you/resting my hand one Writers, 2nd edn, Curtis C. Smith, ed., (Chicago and London: St James' more time/on the horn of your waist//and we would see Press, 1986), pp. 717-718. snow/returning to the empty clouds/like a guilty wife, covering Jones, Langdon, (ed.) The Eye of the Lens (London: MacMillan, 1972; her husband/in ferocious white kisses". Manchester: Savoy Books, 1980). In PBK #7, 1974, Mac King's two poems are road-movieish: Moorcock, Michael, (ed.) Best Sf Stories from New Worlds 3 (London: 'Wind-Dream' - four stanzas; five, eight, two, four lines - "in a Panther, 1968). Moorcock, Michael and Steve Sneyd, ''It Never Occurred To Me Not To new metallic hot-rod,/sleek and crazy,/burnin' farm country Run Poetry' - Michael Moorcock talks about his use of poetry in New blacktop,/Like match hit gas we went through" - and "The Worlds: An interview by Steve Sneyd', Star*Line 15:2 (1992). Wreck" - seven stanzas; six, one, two, four, six, two, one - "late © Steve Sneyd 2004 at night,/stir crazy/.../with my hot black swollen eyes/burnt by lights and tight-bone fever". Steve Sneyd, a published poet, previously contributed to Vector Alfonso Tafoyo had three. The Beatish 'Birds of Prey', set 'Hearing From the Ion Engineers: A Quarter Century of SF Poetry', under "barrel chested/skies/in Colorado", in six very short line in Vector 180 (August/September 1994) and 'Barding the Future: stanzas - two, seventeen, seven, ten, seven, one - evokes Poets as Protagonists in Science Fiction', in Vector 211 (MayJune "shotgun/blasted/visions/decapitated like angel clouds"My 2000) - Eds Mistress' (six, five, four, four, five) is singer-songwriterish - "somnambulist/she staggers/through the rooms/I have set aside/to pray in", this "High Priestess/of the continent/of my body,/ anticipated like the door/she approaches/but does not/enter." 'A Pastoral' (five stanzas; four, eight, ten, one, two), uses perception distortion speculatively to link opening - "Like animated haystacks/moving still air/I jumped from a tree" - and final images - "Haystacks diving in & out of me" - while filmically focusing hardscrabble nostalgia "the after-image/of a pair of lips/puckered/as the headlights/from our Packard/panned the trees". In #10, (1976) sf novelist William Jon Watkins's three-stanza

16 September/October 2004 • Vector 237 First Impressions

Book Reviews edited by Paul Billinger

All novels marked: ! are eligible for the 2002 BSFA Award for Best Novel All collections and anthologies marked: " contain stories eligible for the 2002 BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction

Tony Ballantyne - Recursion Tor UK, London, 2004, 345pp, £12.99, t/p (reviewed in proof), ISBN 1-4050-4139-0 Reviewed by Gary Dalkin

Recursion is formally structured with Of course connections are gradually revealed between the chapters following three different sets three strands, and the title is apt for there are plots within plots to of characters in three different times. a dizzyingly labyrinthine degree, making Recursion a remarkably In the England of 2051 every last ambitious first novel. Recursion is about many things, not the least move is monitored by the benevolent, of which is the nature of identity in a future where, increasingly, stifling Social Care. Eva has an escape anything is possible. In part a virtual reality thriller - think The plan, though soon her only hope lies Matrix (or Daniel F. Galouye's Simulacron-3) as scripted with the with Alison, Katie and Nicolas, three deadpan absurdist humour of Douglas Adams, in collision with other self-professed 'loonies' in a run­ the Australian dislocations of Terry Dowling and the mind­ down mental institution where spinning speculations of Greg Egan. Reality may not be what it everyone is concerned about the Watcher... (coincidentally, a seems for interior or exterior reasons, or both. similarly enigmatic entity informs the background to Peter F. According to the blurb accompanying my advance reading Hamilton's latest book, Pandora's Star). Just because you're mad copy, Recursion is "a wonderfully entertaining debut sf novel” doesn't mean you shouldn't be paranoid, especially if you keep which "will appeal to fans of Michael Moorcock and Stephen seeing the ghost of the brother you never had. Baxter.” Make that "Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter” Australia, 2119, and Constantine is another sort of and I'd agree 100%, but citing Moorcock as a ghost; a corporate agent for one of the five companies reference point seems bizarre; Tony Ballantyne's behind the first Von Neumann Machine-built city, extremely carefully plotted, philosophical, hard sf is able to slip unnoticed through the world-wide diametrically opposed to Moorcock's freewheeling, surveillance web. His assignment is designed to often ramshackle fantasy. Ballantyne's handle on culminate with three meetings in that city. Yet while plotting is stunningly impressive, the twists and turns Stonebreak is rotting from the inside, Constantine is unfolding with clarity, precision and a powerful focused on the Mars Project, the development of imaginative vision, ideas which could have resulted in Warp drive technology and the trustworthiness of the novel being expanded to three times its length Artificial Intelligence. Perhaps the pressure is getting concisely worked into the narrative without a hint of to him, because he has red, white, blue and grey waste. And there are some fine ideas here, from the personalities in his head and parts of the sky keep implications of the drug MTPH to speculations on the going missing. Fermi paradox. Ninety-one years later Herb is caught by Robert Johnston of There's scope too; from Eva's world, not so far removed from the Environment Agency, having accidentally ruined a planet with the dour Britain of a Christopher Priest novel, to the burning a private Von Neumann Machine experiment. Offered a Hobson's chrome of Australia a century hence, to the epic scale of Choice, Herb finds himself assisting Robert in a surreal war chillingly-realised surreal interstellar warfare fought by vast against the Enemy Domain, an expanding sphere of machine inhuman intelligences. Add some welcome, very British humour intelligence rapidly heading Earthwards. and memorable characters - not least the charming, highly

17 Vector 237 • September/October 2004 mysterious Robert Johnston - and the result is an exceptional first come 2005. A new British star has arrived to join the likes of novel (Ballantyne short stories have been appearing regularly in Hamilton, Reynolds and Banks. Interzone since 1998) which should be on every awards shortlist

Ashok K. Banker - Demons of Chitrakut Orbit, London, 2004, 628pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 1-841-49178 Reviewed by K. V. Bailey

This is the third published volume of Ashok Banker's ongoing that it is his dharma to adhere to his father's command, however project of presenting the great Indian Ramayana epic in modern this had been forced from him. The triple principles of dharma but compatible English prose. In earlier volumes, reviewed in (sacred duty), artha (meaning and purpose) and karma (individual Vector 229 and 232, Prince Rama's father, Dasartha, King of fate), which, as Banker points out in his invaluable glossary, are Ayodhya, has been ailing, while his princely heir-apparent is away basic to Vedantic philosophy, operate strongly throughout the from the court and city on various exploits connected with halting remainder of this narrative. Thus, although Rama has become the advance from Lanka (Ceylon) into neighbouring committed to a non-violent way of life, it is his territories of evil forces, headed by the assura (demon) dharma to slay the 'fallen angel' demon, Viradha, the Lord Ravana. In the course of coming to the aid of the attempted abductor of Sita, just as it is Viradha's city of Mithila, Rama, to the frustration of Ravana, dharma to be slain only by Rama. This is not the only becomes betrothed to and marries the Princess Sita, abduction of Sita. Even after the exiled trio have returning with her in triumph to Ayodhya as the present settled to dwell on the comparatively safe hill of volume opens. Harem intrigue, combined with demon­ Chitrakut, high above the demon-infested Dandaka- related sorcery, had long been brewing, and now it van, she is abducted by the arch-demoness comes to a head when the clandestinely demon-allied Supanakha, who, moved by a lust for Rama, shape­ Second Queen, Kaikeyi, is able to make the dying shifts into her body form, but fails to deceive him. In Dasartha fulfil two long-promised boons. She now the rescue, Supanakha is not killed, but is hideously specifies that Rama, son of the First Queen, Kausalya, mutilated by a restrained Lakshman. Seeking revenge, shall be sentenced to fourteen years of exile, and that her own she returns with a remnant army from disintegrating Lanka, and son, Bahrat, shall inherit Ayodhya. Rama obediently departs for the last part of this volume is mainly descriptive of the changing the demon-dominated territories to which he is condemned, strategies of battle, the outcome of which awaits a fourth volume. accompanied by his devoted brother Lakshman and, insistently, Plot as outlined in a brief review can give a misleading by Sita. impression of simplicity. That of the Ramayana is actually quite Bahrat, however, remains loyal to Rama, and with a complex. Ashok Banker's presentation enables appreciation of its supporting army follows and overtakes Rama, intent on many facets of character, landscape, magic and philosophy, while persuading him, Dasartha having now died, to turn back and the essential unity of a great epic is preserved. ascend the throne. This Rama will not do, vigorously maintaining

Ben Bova - The Silent War Tor, New York, 2004, $24.95, h/b, ISBN 0-312-84878-1 & NEL, London, 2004, 437pp, £7.99, p/b, ISBN 0-340-76963-7 Reviewed by Mark Greener

The Astro Corporation and Humphries Space Systems are still complete sense). Moreover, Bova highlights the main characters’ squabbling over the rights to mine the Asteroid Belt and sell the mental and spiritual degradation. When Pancho wants to contact raw materials needed to rebuild the environmentally devastated Lars, she claims to an intermediate (George) that “He knows me” / earth. But the fighting is getting dirty and more violent. And on "He knew you,” George corrected. "Ol’ Lars isn’t the same man earth, a Japanese rival plots complex strategies to pour fuel on the he was back then.” / Pancho gave him a long unhappy look, then flames and take advantage as Astro and Humphries muttered, "Who the hell is?”. Those few lines battle themselves into financial ruin. Meanwhile, represent the book’s leitmotiv. It gives The Silent out in the Asteroid Belt, space pirate Lars Fuchs War a more human focus, make it a less techno­ plans his revenge after losing his love - Amanda - centric book than the previous two. to Humphries .... Over the course of the trilogy, Amanda, Lars The blurb says that this is the finale of Bova’s and Pancho lose their naive optimism and become Asteroid Wars, and it follows the fast-paced and all the more fascinating characters as a result of delightful pattern of the two previous books: The their psychological transformation. Only Humphries Precipice and The Rock Rats. I don’t normally read remains consistent: nefarious, scheming and evil. much space opera or very hard sf, yet I’ve enjoyed Amanda, for example, prostitutes herself to this trilogy enormously. For me, Bova is close to Humphries as part of a nuptial agreement that saves being the perfect hard sf writer: the break-neck Lars’ life. She escapes the degradation of pace never lets up and he never allows the Humphries’s sexual perversions - his ‘special infodumps to get in the way of the story. And performances’ - through drugs. (Although she still despite his position as one of the genre’s grand manages to plot a type of revenge.) masters, his almost youthful enthusiasm for high technology and Lars is willing to let some of Humphries’ mercenaries suffocate astronomy pervades every page. Even when the nanotechnology slowly in space after he blasts their ship. He overrides his that can chomp a spaceship into grey goo gets out of hand, it’s a subordinate’s pleas to show them mercy saying: "Think of it this fallible human’s fault. In these days of post-modern cynicism, I way . we’ve added a few more minor asteroids to the Belt”. Lars’ found this enthusiasm for the white heat of technology infectious loss of compassion reflects the loss of his lover. and refreshing. Pancho changes from an emphatic grease monkey to a high­ On the other hand, I found The Silent War to be a much flying executive willing to send countless people to their death to darker book than either The Precipice or The Rock Rats. There are ensure her company’s profitability. She manipulates Lars’ love for a couple of real shocks that I didn’t see coming (but which make Amanda and his bitter desire for revenge in an attempt to beat

18 September/October 2004 • Vector 237

Humphries at almost any cost. In so doing, she becomes more comes through subterfuge. and more like Humphries, but manages to stay, just, this side of To be honest, the characterisation in the first book struck me becoming overtly evil. as a little thin, even a little cliched. In The Silent War Bova creates These changes in personality, and Bova’s characterisation of some psychologically deep and haunting characters that raise the the mental scars left by the previous events, is telling and at times series together to a new level of excellence and makes the three moving. This is especially true of Amanda who seems more a books stand some way above the standard space opera fare. The victim of circumstances than Lars and Pancho. Amanda's external Silent War is a superlative end to an excellent trilogy. locus of control means that she can't influence events. Her only escape comes from pharmacological oblivion. Her only revenge

Max Brooks - The Zombie Survival Guide Duckworth, London, 2004, 254pp, £8.99, p/b, ISBN 0-7156-3318-X

Reviewed by Colin Odell and Mitch Le Blanc Reviewed by Simon Morden Frequenters of discount bookshops will undoubtedly be familiar No, seriously. Max Brooks takes us where Andy McNab and Ray with the plethora of SAS/CIA/FBI/B&Q survival guides available - Mears would never dream of going - forget about how to infiltrate you know the thing: how to eat like a prince when stranded in a enemy lines or subsisting off a diet of grubs and ants. When the carnivore-infested jungle in deepest South America armed only chips are down and the streets are full of shambling undead, it's with a toothpick and a tube of Brylcreem. Normally, said tome is Brooks who's going to save you and your loved ones. small and non-inclusive, or the size of a small shed and unlikely As you'd expect in such a detailed book, almost every aspect to be of any practical use in the field unless you use it as a shelter. of survival is covered. From the pathology of the lethally And then there's the whole "What's the point?" factor, bearing in contagious Solanum virus, through zombie physiology, we mind you are unlikely to have a supply of toothpicks, have little understand the reason for the all-important ‘head shot'. Weapons interest in male hair-grooming products and are, frankly, unlikely are discussed in significant depth: for we Europeans who lack to find yourself in a carnivore-infested jungle in deepest South access to firearms, it's not the end of the world, because common America. Silent garrotting techniques are of limited use in the household implements - crowbars, lump hammers, axes, back-streets of Bolton (arguably) and preparing red-back spider machetes - can be your friends too. Warnings regarding fuel- souffle (a culinary delight) inappropriate in suburban Dudley. No, hungry power tools are given, as is the caveat that knives don't my friends, what you need is a real survival guide, one that is need reloading. useful and relevant to you and your immediate For a minor Class 1 outbreak, all you then have to family. One that doesn't require 6th Dan Aikido or do is sit tight and wait for the Armed Response Unit. elaborate military equipment (although that could But what about survival in a major Class 3 attack? Here, prove useful - don't knock it), one that will save Brooks doesn't stint on information. Bicycles and your life, not make you look macho on a paint­ motorbikes, especially those with off-road tyres, will be balling weekend in Bognor. You may mock but you your best bet. Whilst the rest of your city is gridlocked are under the imminent threat of invasion by the in zombie-friendly cars, you're past the city limits and undead, which is where The Zombie Survival Guide looking for a place to hole up until the emergency is comes in. Zombie attacks have been with us for over. some time and ignorance is the zombie's best What if the worst happened? This is dealt with in weapon - people don't want to face the prospect of the last chapter - Living in Zombie World. A pitiful decapitating a loved one or the fact that the dead remnant of survivors left on a planet with several billion can rise and eat the living. The Zombie Survival undead would stand no chance, right? Brooks presses Guide goes some way to address the myths, explain the latest the requirement for absolute secrecy and stealth, for a fortress far scientific theories on the spread of the zombie virus and, most away from civilisation, and ground in which to grow crops - for importantly, advise on what you can do to escape a fate worse upwards of twenty years. than death... and death as well. The book finishes with a series of studies, zombie attacks Packed full of useful tips and eye-witness accounts, The throughout recorded history, which shows the menace has always Zombie Survival Guide helps you to make those tough decisions: been with us. The ancient Egyptians removed the brains of their do you stay city bound where there are better supplies, high-rise dead during mummification. Hadrian's Wall was erected in flats providing stair destruction potential (always a good one to response to a Class 3 outbreak in Caledonia. The Chinese stop the shambling dead) and hope of contact with other repeatedly report cases of ‘Eternal Waking Nightmare'. Right up to survivors, but offers possible enemies, more zombies, greater risk the present day, zombies appear, are eventually dispatched by of disease and the chance that the army might nuke you off the locals or the authorities, and all evidence swiftly removed to face of the earth? Or go to the desert - big visibility, fewer avoid panic. zombies, but no supplies and the heat will kill you off in a day? None of this is true. It can't be. Zombies - virus-infected, re­ The choices are difficult but meticulously described so you can animated dead - don't exist. Brooks' tongue is firmly in his cheek make an informed decision. Then there are weapons: Uzis might throughout every sentence. This is a parody of all the ‘in the event look cool in urban gangster films but in reality you want massive, of a nuclear attack' books, all the ‘YOU can be a trained killer like accurate cerebral damage. Chainsaws look very Evil Dead but are, the SAS' guides, all the ‘you've got five lentils and a toothbrush - frankly, a liability. Remember the golden rule: swords don't need let's make a watertight shelter' programs. It's silly, pointless (much reloading. like supposedly real survival guides), and full of useless facts. The Zombie Survival Guide is a well thought-out and Yet, yet... the utterly dry ‘Protect and Survive' telling style, the amusingly illustrated straight-faced pastiche of the whole survival use of crude line drawings, the relentless made-up history and guide phenomena. In many ways it's the earnest tone that's the statistics, the sheer volume of detail included: the total effect is scariest - it could happen now! Comes complete with an outbreak eerily overwhelming, and gave me the creeps for a week. I doubt section in the back for you to note your direct encounters and that I'll read a more disturbing book all year. Buy it for yourself, make your own zombie diary, should you still have a pen come your friends, put a copy next to your toilet. Brilliantly written, the day that the gates of hell open onto the Earth... morbidly funny, completely convincing - who else are you going to trust to keep your brains fresh but Brooks?

19 Vector 237 • September/October 2004

N. M. Browne - Basilisk Bloomsbury, 2004, 320pp, £5.99, p/b (reviewed in proof), ISBN 0-7475-6326-8 Reviewed by Elizabeth A. Billinger

In a medieval-type world, typical of fantasy, there are two Donna and Rej (character-naming is maybe not one of communities - those who live above ground and those who live Browne's skills) are the sort of stubborn, independent-minded below it, a much more science-fictional division. The combers young adults who cannot leave a puzzle or an injustice alone. live in a seemingly endless web of tunnels, with slippery cliff From the discovery that there are privileged ones who disdain the faces, rope networks, narrow caves and niches adopted as homes, Sumptuary Laws, dressing in furs, keeping warm by a real fire, insufficient food and a drug, Stenk, that makes life maintaining a well-stocked cabinet of drinks and tolerable. Rej, whose home is in these catacombs, other potions, they are gradually drawn into a dreams of dragons - dreams he is a dragon - and dangerous and complex plot. The conspiracy tries to evade his brutal creditors. involves the war that engages the city and is In the refectory and university barracks Above, responsible for the Sumptuary Laws, an unwise war Donna, struggling to maintain the humility of a that cannot be won; it also involves a terrible threat young scribe, suffers the privations and lack of food to individuals whom Donna and Rej try to protect, resulting from extreme Sumptuary Laws, and and to the whole comber community, regarded by dreams of dragons - dreams she is a dragon. the corrupt authorities of Above as entirely It is inevitable that these two young people, undesirable and disposable. only just become adults, will meet, will discover For all its fantasy mise en scene, this novel has a some unexpected link and in all probability fall in strong science-fictional flavour to it, maintaining an love. Browne's talent is to go with this simple internal logic and building a picture of its own, structure. She attempts no pyrotechnics, no admittedly mystical, science to explain the fantastic outrageous plot twists, but relies on her solid happenings. This is one of those odd books that on storytelling skills - to construct an intriguing reflection seems to do nothing particularly new or mystery, to create believable and likeable characters and a fully startlingly original, but does it with such skill and conviction that realised world - to tell a gripping story. the result is a memorable and satisfying read.

Charles Butler - The Fetch of Mardy Watt Collins, London, 2004, 223pp, £5.99, p/b, ISBN 0-00-712857-6 Reviewed by Andrew M. Butler

The renaissance of fantastical children's fiction continues with this a character, when he took centre stage in the plot I was worried enchanting and scary novel. Mardy Watt is having a difficult time; that, as in His Dark Materials, a strong female protagonist had her father died some time ago and her brother is now in a suddenly become helpless and was to be supplanted by an active mysterious coma in hospital, possibly slipping away from life. boy. I should have had more faith in the story-telling, as nothing is Meanwhile at school she is thrown by Rachel Fludd, a new girl quite what it seems and the title turns out not to have been whom she thinks is a witch, and there is a doppelganger, a fetch, misleading. haunting Mardy, always one step ahead - causing havoc at home, More annoying, and this is unlikely to be the author's fault, is buying chocolate in the shop, generally getting her into trouble. that the typeface of the novel feels very childish to me. There is And because the double, the fetch, looks exactly like her, more to fonts than Times Roman, of course, but this left rather too everyone is blaming Mardy, or thinking she's lost it. Mardy fears much white space for me as an adult reader. Presumably that she's about to be usurped from her own life. HarperCollins have done research and it is appropriate for the Towards its beginning the novel has a flavour of early Garner, target audience, which I'd guess is early teens, and probably with the sense of another, more fantastical and also more female. dangerous world being merely a whisker away, with music being The book comes garlanded with praise from Susan Cooper one of the things that can cross the gap. This may be a deliberate and Diana Wynne Jones, and would be enjoyed by anyone who homage or an unconscious echo, as I know Charles Butler has thrilled to Ann Halam's horror novels. I missed Butler's earlier written about Garner in the past. The sibling in hospital parallels novels, something I hope to remedy soon although, sadly, none David Almond's Skellig, although the patient's state has a entirely are currently in print. Even better, the ending of The Fetch of different significance to the plot (and Almond's book left me Mardy Watt suggests to me that there is more to explore in this feeling uncomfortable about what he did with it). None of this is collision of realities, and I'm hoping that Butler will return to to say the novel isn't original; the plot moves in unexpected these characters. directions with more twists and turns than a twisty-turny thing. For example, much as I liked Mardy's best male friend, Hal, as

Ramsey Campbell - Alone with the Horrors Tor, New York, 2004, 448pp, $27.95, h/b, ISBN 0-765-30767-7 Reviewed by Mark Greener

For more than 40 years, Ramsey Campbell has published stylish, essentially a reprint of a 1993 book, but with a new introduction.) evocative, literary horror stories, closer in style and substance to The collection begins with a Lovecraftian pastiche, 'The Tower M. R. James or Lovecraft than Shaun Hutson or Guy N. Smith. from Yuggoth' (another addition for this edition). Campbell's Lovecraft was notoriously dismissive of most of his fellow pulp somewhat unpolished talent shines through in this early story. authors and their lack of literary merit. However, I suspect Indeed, the collection offers a fascinating snapshot of Campbell's Lovecraft would find much to admire in Campbell's work. Alone literary evolution, his maturity into a master of the short story with the Horrors exemplifies perfectly why Campbell is one of form. dark fantasy's masters. But while some things change, others remain the same. Many Alone with the Horrors collects almost 40 short stories of the stories betray traces of Lovecraft's influence: typically a published between 1961 and 1991. (This new Tor edition is personality flaw, either personally or in someone close, condemns

20 September/October 2004 • Vector 237 the characters to confront cosmic horrors. Campbell adds demons. numerous twists to the basic structure. In addition, unlike But Alone with the Horrors isn't uniformly bleak. Campbell Lovecraft, Campbell excels at character-driven horror. often shows a deft touch of humour. 'Call First', from 1974, As this suggests, Campbell writes classic transcategorical brought to mind the classic EC comics or Amicus movies. (Indeed, horror stories that span boundaries: between living and dead, it was written for a Marvel magazine in homage to the EC comics.) between old gods and the modern age, between myth and reality. The poetic justice of 'Out of Copyright' is laced with black Campbell effectively uses horror's ability to allow us to escape the humour. shackles of societal pressure and conventional morality to explore Still other stories show Campbell's command of the short story and dissect our sexual, psychological and physical fears and form. In stories such as 'Baby', 'The Chimney', 'The Voice of the motivations. But in the end we face our demons alone: the book's Beach' and 'Midnight Hobo', Campbell slowly tightens the title is telling. narrative screw, building the tension. The end, which Forget splatterpunk: Campbell's stories are more is logical yet unexpected, comes as a cathartic relief. disturbing than most gore-fests because they creep Despite the slow pace, Campbell doesn't use a up on you on a psychological rather than visceral superfluous word. In many ways, Campbell is a level. What Campbell leaves unsaid is often all the modern Le Fanu. more terrifying than Grand Guignol. Indeed, the Critics often condemn - without reason - the cumulative effect of several stories can be horror genre as lacking in literary verve. Campbell profoundly disturbing on allegorical, sociological, gives the lie to this with often-deft prose, especially psychological and sexual levels. in the latter stories: “Elaborate lichens swelled brittle In 1996's 'Cold Print', a man with a fetish for branches; everywhere he looked, life burgeoned spanking faces the consequences of his sexuality in parasitically, consuming the earth and the forest, a a surprisingly moralistic tale. 'The Guy' and contestant and ruthless renewal” [230]. "Everything 'Another World' are truly unsettling, because the was hallucinatorily intense: beyond cracks in the horror arises from the characters' flaws and island's grassy coastline, the sea glittered as though Asperger's-like obsessions, rather than being imposed by an crystallising and shattering: across the sea, Welsh hills and mist outside evil. appeared to be creating each other”. [296]. Campbell's evocative Other stories, such as 'The Bag' or 'The Chimney', offer prose augments the disquiet that he so effectively evokes. insightful windows into aberrant psychology, epitomising the Alone with the Horrors confirms Campbell as a master of dark isolation and disenfranchisement that is, all too often, a feature of fantasy. If you've not read Campbell before, Alone with the modern life. The stories personify our fears of the other; be that Horrors is the perfect introduction. If you have, it's an essential internal or external. (The fear of the other is, of course, a leitmotif collection of some of his finest work. Even if you have only a in sf generally.) We identify with 'monsters' - whether it's the passing interest in horror or dark fantasy you really need to own Wolf Man, Dracula, or Campbell's psychologically disturbed this. Now. characters - because they reflect the conflicts, ambiguity and ambivalences in all of us that merge to create our personal

Trudi Canavan - The Novice Orbit, London, 2004, 577pp, £7.99, p/b, ISBN 1-84149-314-7 Reviewed by Andrew A. Adams

This is Canavan's second novel and the middle of her Black Administrator Lorlen. Forced to become Akkarin's chosen novice Magician Trilogy. From the speed of publication (and the she, and they, fear the worst. copyright dates) the complete trilogy had already been published Meanwhile, Rothen's friend Dannyl has been named an in her native Australia before gaining a UK release from Orbit. I'm ambassador and is attempting to surreptitiously investigate the eagerly awaiting the final instalment which I'm High Lord's past. New to the game of discreet hoping will follow quickly. investigation, however, he and his friends tip their We continue to follow Sonea, the lower-class hand to Akkarin. Dannyl is recalled to the Guild to girl admitted to the Magician's Guild at the end of face him, and Canavan sets up the denouement of the first book. There are two main strands to this this middle volume with aplomb. There is a volume: Sonea's progress as the eponymous cracking twist in this tale that I won't spoil, but it's Novice, studying magic at the Guild University, and a bit like Babylon 5: "No one is exactly what they various people's investigations into the illicit appear". There are bigger things going on in the activities of the High Lord of the Guild, Akkarin. world than Rothen, Dannyl and Sonea believe, Sonea's treatment at the hands of the rest of the and even the Guild Administrator is mostly in the 'noble' intake of students at the University will ring dark. disturbingly true for anyone bullied as a child. If Canavan can complete the trilogy with the Disturbing, but so well written it's compelling. Her same level of excitement, mystery and intrigue attempts to take the moral high ground, turn the present in the first two books she will have other cheek and not cause trouble fail to make any reached a level rarely attained by a new author, impact on the malice of her primary tormentor Regin (a regal writing with the assurance and deft plotting and characterisation name for a truly nasty piece of work). His unwanted attentions of someone with many years' experience. In the midst of the plot, force Sonea to reach for her potential with all her efforts and she character development takes place that's as natural as breathing. makes some interesting discoveries along the way, including the At just under six hundred pages this book has a page-turning labyrinthine layout of the Guild enclosure and its buildings. quality that will have you staying up half the night to finish it Unfortunately her discovery of Akkarin's illicit activities returns to without dragging once. This author will be one to watch out for haunt her, her friend and mentor Rothen and the Guild on her future projects.

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Steve Cash - The Meq Tor UK, London, 2004, 545pp, £7.99, p/b, ISBN 0 330 49315 9 Reviewed by Estelle Roberts

This is Steve Cash's first novel and, once again, book one in a character - who, it transpires, has killed several times in the series which utilises the idea of ‘those who live among us'. They course of his very long life - kidnaps the young daughter of Z's may look like us, they mostly mean us no harm, but they are very close, non-Meq friend, prompting him to conduct an different in various ways, some more obvious than others. In this obsessional search lasting many years, despite the fact that he has case, they are the Meq of the title, an ancient and mysterious race, only just met his own soulmate, or ameq. This is combined with apparently with strong connections to the Basque land and the background story of the Meq's attempts to adjust to a world people. Their main physical attribute is that, unless they choose to that is changing ever more quickly, and to find their own place undergo a particular ancient ritual, they do not age once they within it, as they realise they must adapt or face the end of their reach twelve years old. They also heal extremely quickly and have kind. true soulmates, who undergo the aforementioned The novel is interesting, fairly intriguing, and has ritual with them and can bring joy and despair in positive elements, but it does contain some grammatical equal measure. tics, which can become wearing towards the end, The story centres on a young Meq boy by the particularly the overuse of quotation marks. The majority name of Zianno, who is usually called Z. Following of the characters, both Meq and ordinary human, are the death of his parents in a train crash, he well-rounded and individual, some having very long fortuitously comes under the protection of an old back stories, which benefit the narrative. Zianno is a man called Solomon. He finds a home in St. Louis sympathetic narrator as he attempts to negotiate the with a friend of Solomon's, meets more people like emotional, personal and moral conflicts in his life. The himself, and begins to learn more about his heritage; Fleur du Mal, however, comes across as a moustache in particular, about a set of stones that he inherits, twiddling villain, relishing his intrigues, and is one of the sewn into a baseball glove, which possess the power novel's less original elements. The feel of time and place to influence the thoughts of ordinary humans. His interest is throughout the entire novel is very well handled; you are further piqued when he discovers that there are several other sets transported to many different countries and time periods, and they of stones in existence. However, the main action, certainly of the do feel genuine. How to cope as an outsider in a changing world later part of the novel, is concerned with Z's attempts to thwart is another strong element. All in all, this story is a good, if not the plans of a much older, renegade Meq known to the others as particularly outstanding, read. the Fleur du Mal. Displaying psychopathic tendencies, this

Peter Crowther (Ed.) - Postscripts #1 PS Publishing, Harrogate, 2004, 1 70pp, £6.00, p/b, ISBN 190461920-7 Reviewed by Niall Harrison

Postscripts, the new quarterly magazine from PS Publishing, is and this is no exception. notable for its wide remit. All genres are welcome, it seems - Quieter, more thoughtful, and very nearly as good is Eric science fiction and fantasy predominate, but happily rub Brown's 'A Choice of Eternities'. In this future Earth has been shoulders with horror and crime. Are pirate tales, or Westerns, or visited by an alien race, the Kethani, who can and will, if asked, (even) romance stories far away? Personally, I wouldn't mind if fit an individual with an implant that allows their resurrection after they weren't; partly because I like the uncertainty that comes with death. Brown has written about the Kethani technology before (for not knowing what a magazine is going to put in front of me, but instance 'The Wisdom of the Dead', Interzone 186), but this is the mostly because I trust Pete Crowther's taste enough to (mostly) best use of the setting that I've seen, and the story offers a real read what he recommends. debate centred on humanity's beliefs about life and death. It helps that there are also a lot of stories to choose from - I also liked Adam Roberts' 'Roads Were Burning' and Jay thirteen in the first issue, which means that you're almost certain Lake's 'The Rose Egg'. Both of these stories boast vivid imagery - to like something; although that said I'd be just as happy to see a the Roberts via a powerful metaphor that envisages roads as a smaller number of longer stories in future issues. I'd even be country's circulatory system, the Lake through a sparky, willing to see the non-fiction sacrificed, since although all the memorable first-person voice and a nicely dirty future. However, pieces here - a guest editorial by Christopher Fowler; a lengthy both also have endings that feel slightly rushed, and for me interview with James P. Blaylock; a look back at previous genre neither story quite fulfilled its promise. Elsewhere James magazines by Mike Ashley - were diverting enough, I didn't find Lovegrove's 'Seventeen Syllables' offers a new and visceral any of them particularly memorable. On a more shallow note, the definition of 'minimalist horror'. design of the magazine is good, with high quality paper, a clean On the downside, I felt that several of the contributions from layout, and a gorgeous Edward Miller cover. The only thing I'm established Names were disappointing. Brian Aldiss' 'Tarzan of not entirely convinced by is the choice of typeface for the the Alps' is a relatively minor slice of whimsy, Ramsey Campbell's magazine logo. 'Direct Line' was a disappointingly obvious mobile phone horror, However, all of the above is somewhat by-the-by. What really and Ray Bradbury's poem 'The Visitation' left me cold. I can't matters is this: are the stories any good? help feeling that maybe some of these pieces were included as A couple are excellent. Peter F. Hamilton's cover story, much to make the contents page look impressive as on their own 'Footvote', is probably top of the heap. It's a recent-past alternate merits. history in which 2003 went a little differently: a wealthy And if that's the case it's a real shame because, on the entrepreneur somehow opened up a wormhole to a brand-new evidence of the other stories in this issue, Postscripts isn't going to green and pleasant land that now offers everyone dissatisfied with have a problem getting by on those merits. My only concern is the Blair government somewhere to emigrate to... as long as they that perhaps some readers will be put off by the diversity on meet the entrance criteria. Very political, very smart, quite funny, display. To any such who might be reading I'd say this: true, you and, I think, one of the best stories of the year so far. Hamilton's should not buy Postscripts expecting another Interzone or The short fiction (such as his previous PS novella 'Watching Trees Third Alternative. You should still buy it, though, simply because Grow') often leaves me wishing he'd visit the form more often, it is good - and occasionally, excellent.

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John Grant & Audre Vysniauskas - Digital Art for the 21st Century: Rendrosity Artists' and Photographers' Press Ltd., London, 2004, 160pp, £19.95, h/b, ISBN 1-904332-18-8 Reviewed by Colin Odell and Mitch Le Blanc

Digital Art's easy, innit? Just scan in a few photos and press a further example of the medium's encompassing accessibility button - instant art that even a five year old can master at the click outside of more accepted routes - a truly socialist art movement of a mouse. Well, believe it or not, digital art is more than that - in many ways. The works themselves range from the it's real honest-to-goodness art, but it uses a different and photorealistic to the abstract and the book is all the better for it - relatively new medium. Part of the perceived ‘problem' with what unites these artists is the medium not the style. digital art lies with its very strength and accessibility - it is As for whether the artwork's any good, well, that clearly boils reproducible and malleable in a way that Andy Warhol could down to being a matter of taste. Our personal preferences include only dream of. This accessibility, combined with technophobia Bernard Dumaine's organic Gigeresque forms, Tina Oloyede's and cultural snobbery that treats only unique single works as stunning fractal abstracts, Elizabeth Legget's mysterious portraits somehow worthy of attention, has given the digital art movement and Kees Roobol's hyper-realist landscapes and cityscapes. We're a bad press as somehow less worthy than traditional art forms. generally not that into the fantasy stuff, but Andy Simmon's This notion is challenged by Rendrosity.com, an online art Dragons Day Off is a rather amusing image of a dragon sitting by community comprising a large number of digital artists from a a tranquil pool, fishing, rendered in the style of John Constable. variety of backgrounds who all use the digital format. This lavishly Digital Art for the 21st Century offers an eclectic and illustrated book offers us works from 21 of these artists. thoughtful selection of works in a traditional artbook format, far Each portfolio is accompanied by brief autobiographical notes removed from their digital origins. You won't like it all - you're and it's interesting to appreciate the range of artists on offer here. not meant to like it all - but it offers a good indication of the We have professional illustrators alongside talented amateurs who current state of play and waves a solid flag for the future all work by day and render by night, and from a variety of acceptance of digital art as a legitimate form of expression. nationalities as well. Interestingly, many of the digital artists trained as scientists before discovering the joys of digital art, a

David A. Hardy & Patrick Moore - Futures: 50 Years in Space Artists' and Photographers' Press Ltd., London, 2004, 112pp, £17.95, h/b, ISBN 1-904332-13-7 Reviewed by Colin Odell and Mitch Le Blanc

If men are from Mars and women are the solar system has been covered, Moore and Hardy move out of from Venus, then men are cold, red, our immediate galactic backyard and onto the increasingly dry and have a giant volcano, while speculative realms of galaxies, nebulae and black holes where our women are hot, cloudy and rain everyday conceptions of scale and even existence are severely sulphuric acid. Hmm, best not pursue challenged. this train of thought. But this The text is unquestionably fascinating even for those with only conjecture does give us a hint as to a passing interest in astronomy, with Moore's enthusiasm and the contents of Futures: 50 Years in knowledge leaping out from every page. The illustrations are Space - The Challenge of the Stars. more variable. The best artwork depicts the impressions of the Futures is authored by the wonderful pure landscapes and spacescapes. There is a stunning illustration Patrick Moore, who needs no introduction, and illustrated by artist of polar aurorae on Jupiter and a view of Neptune from the south David Hardy, who was the first artist on The Sky at Night. It is an pole of its satellite Miranda (as could be seen in 2029, fact fans, updating of The Challenge of the Stars, originally written some 30 although you'll have to years ago. The book comprises a written introduction to every hurry if you want to get planet in the solar system, with detailed descriptions of its there in time). However, composition, atmosphere and geography, and all lavishly some of the paintings illustrated, making full use of the book's ample dimensions - you include images of could use it as shelter should you be washed up on a desert island possible space craft, with a gramophone and the complete works of Shakespeare. probes or even base stations Time is an important factor in this edition; each description and, although perfectly also gives us an idea of how theories about a planet's composition relevant to the speculative have changed over the years, with modern thinking enhanced by nature of the book, are the information sent to us by sophisticated telescopes and probes, somehow less interesting. improving our understanding of other worlds. Did you know, for But that's purely a matter of example, that the gravity of Saturn's satellite Mimas is so weak personal preference, the you'd have trouble distinguishing up from down? Or, if you quality of the artwork viewed Saturn from Mimas, you'd never see the full beauty of the cannot be faulted and manages to be informative without being rings, because Mimas moves in the same plane as the ring system. overly cold and technical. Or that Pluto and its satellite Charon have identical rotation A fascinating and enlightening read but you are left asking one periods and could therefore be viewed as a double planet? Once question: are cats from Callisto?

Kate Jacoby - Trial of Fire Gollancz, London, 2004, 441pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 0-575-07405-1 Reviewed by Cherith Baldry

Finally, the fifth and last volume of Kate Jacoby's Elita sequence, expectation. Having read it, I wasn't disappointed, but it's hard to which I for one have been waiting for with interest and write the review which inevitably has to be of the whole sequence and not just this single book.

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For those unfamiliar with the series, the kingdom of Lusara has Jennifer's son Andrew, who at first does not know that Robert is suffered for many years under oppressive rulers. The people with his father. Robert's ambition is to put Andrew on the throne of the will and the ability to free their country are a Lusara; most of the obstacles arise out of Andrew's group of sorcerers, led by Robert Douglas, Duke of own nature, and I was impressed by the way the Haddon, but their efforts are constrained because story is worked out and the true meaning of the sorcery is banned and discovery would mean their prophecy becomes clear. death. Robert Douglas also has to contend with a My only reservations are that I felt sometimes the prophecy which seems to say that he will destroy plot becomes too complicated, particularly in the what he most loves. His fears of what that means build-up to the final conflict between Robert, Jennifer warp his relationship with Jennifer Ross, whom he and Nash. There are also one or two incidents dare not allow himself to love. Joined with them in presented as having vast significance that to my mind the prophecy is an evil sorcerer, Samdon Nash; it’s they did not quite deserve. I also wonder if the possible that Jennifer may be destined to ally herself epilogue, showing a glimpse of the survivors' lives a with him and not with Robert. few years after the end of the conflict, was really This brief summary doesn’t do justice to the detail necessary. of Jacoby's world, the complexity of its politics, or the However, these are minor niggles. The sequence variety of characters. She gives Lusara and its surrounding areas a as a whole is intelligent, impressive in the way it presents the solid reality; this isn't just superficial genre fantasy. stories of individuals against the sweep of great events covering a In this fifth book the characters begin to move towards their number of years, and well worth reading. However, there's simply final confrontation. Nash has used vile means to regenerate no point in starting with this volume. Although it begins with a himself after a previous defeat, and emerges as a figure of brief outline of what has gone before, I doubt any reader could frightening power. His opponents, in contrast, are limited by their grasp the full complexity without beginning with the first book, own decency. The focus of much of the book is on Robert and Exile's Return. I'd recommend any lover of fantasy to do just that.

Diana Wynne Jones - Changeover Moondust Books, London, 2004, 256pp, £9.99, p/b, ISBN 0-954 7498-0-4 Reviewed by Penny Hill

This is a welcome re-issue from Moondust Books of Diana Wynne The various characters are all appropriately flawed, most Jones' first novel, a book previously so hard to get hold of that a notably the caricatured academics, Lucille and Tony, who keen fan like me hadn't even heard of it. It is a pity that the cover represent a horrific type most famously lampooned in The History art doesn't reflect the wealth of humour of the story within - Man. On the other hand Tessa, the equivalent to the princess in however this can probably be ascribed to the limited budget of a the Russian original, decides to use the Changeover situation to small press. change her decisions about her future and learns about her own It occupies rather different territory than her later works, being weaknesses in the process - as well as providing some an update on the story of Lieutenant Kije (made famous by wonderfully observed adult comedy in her various 'wooing' Prokofiev's eponymous Concert Suite) - the man who exists only scenes. as a clerical error but becomes a hero, wins a princess and is sent Although the end-of-Empire setting was contemporary at the into exile. Here the non-existent ‘Mark Changeover' starts as an time of writing and is now no longer directly representative of ineffectual aide-de-camp's note of instruction to celebrate the time World politics, the novel does not come across as dated but rather of the handover of an African country and is misunderstood by the as a reflection of a period in recent history. Tony's comments on crusty Governor to be a dangerous criminal. white supremacy in South Africa just make us hope that it is The effect snowballs as the Governor attempts to find out unlikely for someone to state this overtly nowadays. more about this person. In this believable satire upon the sunset of However, the satire of misinformation is still relevant today British patriarchal imperialism, the ‘Emperor's New Clothes' effect given extra resonance by the current state of information about means that each new person pretends to know all about Mark Iraq. It would not be stretching imagination too far to picture a Changeover, adding “artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald similar situation arising there. There is a whole sub-plot involving and unconvincing narrative". The rumour becomes more detailed, the American military which rings as true today as when it was leading to a complicated plot with all the frenetic pace and first written. coincidences of a screwball comedy or extravagant farce. The I would say that the author's own distinctive voice can be convergence of all the principal characters on the Blue Banana discerned even in this early work, although the influences of other made me think of the Blue Parrot in Casablanca, but I'm not sure writers may be clearer here than in later books. The tone and if that was deliberate. content are more adult than her subsequent works - the comedy The believability of this satire is founded in the snivelling being fairly suggestive and not suitable for children. It remains nature of the junior aide-de-camp Harold, the need of the new however an exhilarating story, with merit in its own right. It Prime Minister Aweyo to save face and the rivalry between the certainly demands a wider audience than Wynne Jones' different sections of British Military Intelligence. Add to this the completists. selfishness or self-seeking nature of most of the characters and [Available from www.moondustbooks.biz] everyone has a reason to join in the conspiracy.

Stephen Jones (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Vampires Robinson, London, 2004, 628pp, £7.99, p/b, ISBN 1-84119-926-5 Reviewed by Colin Odell and Mitch Le Blanc

The Mammoth Book of Vampires does exactly what it says on the celebrated authors - Clive Barker, Brian Stableford, Michael cover - it's a huge tome and it's full of vampires. It's so big you Marshall Smith, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Bloch, Hugh Cave, could use it as a mallet to help hammer a stake home should you Nancy Kilpatrick and many more. And with such a diverse range encounter one of the living dead on a dark and stormy night. But of authors come an eclectic range of stories - we have vampire as it would be far more enjoyable (and less gory) if you read it. It's an metaphor, vampire as serial killer, updatings of time-honoured anthology of vampire short stories written by a number of vampire tales (some modern and some classic) and so on. The

24 September/October 2004 • Vector 237 influences extend from traditional Victorian literature to The destroy the vampire Bianca. Making full use of Christian Rocky Horror Picture Show with lengths ranging mythology, the story twists the reader's from a couple of pages to novellas. Some have perception of which character is good and appeared in print before and others are completely which is evil. The highlight of the tome, new, so you're bound to find several stories of however, is Kim Newman's ‘Andy Warhol's interest and, in fact, most of them are jolly good Dracula’ (bit of a mouthful, that), especially for reads. those who know and love the alternate history So, what's on offer? Best of the bunch includes Anno Dracula series. The latest story has Les Daniel's ‘Yellow Fog’ which is a nod to the reached the 1960's and 70's and pop is Victorian penny dreadful, with horror and mystery definitely, most definitely, in. The story is a in equal measure. Neil Gaiman offers a series of particular joy if you are familiar with the culture unusual vignettes, all based around a vampiric tarot of the time as it contains many presque deja vus deck. ‘Beyond Any Measure’ (Karl Edward Wagner) to those who know about the beautiful people, is a tale of decadence, debauchery and works and writings of that particular era. It's also doppelgangers, while Paul McAuley's ‘Straight to great for film buffs as you try to spot the Hell' offers us a sordid look at the rise and fall of a references - you can bet that many of the rock star and the rise and rise of his vampiric character names have appeared on the silver mentor. Speaking of sordid, Harlan Ellison's ‘Try A Dull Knife’ screen at some point. tells the sorry tale of the downfall of empath Eddie Burma, drained So, recommended for those who like big books, but don't of his psychic energy. Tanith Lee provides an alternative Snow have time to dedicate themselves to a single story. A veritable pot White tale, ‘Red as Blood’, where the Witch Queen seeks to pourri of nosferatu nibblings.

Stephen King - Song of Susannah Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2004, 430pp, £20.00, h/b, ISBN 0-340-82718-1 Reviewed by Alan Fraser

Susannah looked at her with with a synopsis of the series so far, but warned at the end of it that mounting excitement. "It's another Wolves was not the place to start reading, and advised all readers twin-thing." to start at the beginning. Not only do you need to know the "Do you say so?" complex plotlines, but you also need to have absorbed the "Yes. Only this time Tweedle Dum atmosphere and background of the Dark Tower series. So don’t and Tweedle Dee are science and start here either! This book does not have a beginning or an end, magic. Rational and irrational. Sane it just starts, continues the story, and then stops - when you don’t and insane. No matter what terms want it to. Fortunately the final novel in the sequence, The Dark you pick, that's a double-damned pair if there ever was one." Tower, will be published on 21st September 2004 (Stephen King’s Bob Dylan’s last studio album, which includes the song Tweedle birthday) to conclude the story. Dee and Tweedle Dum, was called ‘Love and Theft’, and each A major character in Wolves was Father Callahan from King’s song, though uniquely Dylanesque, borrows both lyrically and 1975 vampire novel Salem's Lot, who had been transported to musically from a wide range of American popular music and Mid-World, and was now again a priest in the border town of culture from the 20th Century and before - from Shakespeare and Calla Bryn Sturgis (a reference to Magnificent Seven director John F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example. Dylan fan web-sites list the many Sturges). In this book Father Callahan has joined Roland’s band or references to songs, books and films. Of course, with America ‘ka-tet’ and goes with the boy Jake to New York in 1999 to stop being such a litigious society, many in the press have howled Susannah-Mia, while Roland and Eddie Dean go back to 1977 in "plagiarism"! Much to their chagrin, none of the copyright holders search of Calvin Tower, a rare book dealer from New York on the of the loved and stolen have chosen to invoke the law. I mention run from the ‘low men’ in King’s home state of Maine. Tower this because Stephen King’s Dark Tower books holds the key to success in 1999, and the low men are agents of the Crimson King, King’s equivalent of Satan, are works in a similar jackdaw vein, and also From the Portland Sunday Telegram, June 20, 1999: Hearts in Atlantis. because Stephen King is a Bob Dylan fan (his last STEPHEN KING DIES NEAR who also appear in King’s King LOVELL HOME non-Tower book was called From a Buick Eight, puts himself as a character in the novel, albeit in POPULAR MAINE WRITER KILLED echoing Bob Dylan’s 1965 song ‘From A Buick WHILE TAKING AFTERNOON WALK an alternate reality - in 1977 meeting his INSIDER CLAIMS MAN DRIVING LETHAL characters Roland and Eddie, and in a coda Six’), and the Dark Tower books refer to and VAN 'TOOK EYES OFF THE ROAD’ AS HE quote from Dylan many times. APPROACHED KING ON ROUTE 7 purporting to be a writer’s journal, explaining the By Ray Routhier history of the Gunslinger stories. It reads Song of Susannah is the latest and LOVELL, ME. (Exclusive) Maine’s most popular author was struck and killed by a van while walking near his summer home yesterday convincingly but ends in 1999 after King has penultimate chapter in the Dark Tower saga, set afternoon.The van was driven by Bryan Smith of Fryeburg, According to sources dose to the case, Smith has admitted that he ‘took his been killed in the hit-and-run accident that in the alternate American West of Mid-World eyes off the road’ when one of his Rottweilers got out of the back of the van and began nosing into a cooler behind the driver’s seat. actually left him critically injured. Not only does (yes, there are Tolkien references, too) and ‘I never even saw him,’ Smith is reported to have said shortly after the collision, which took place on what locals call Slab City Hill. he paint an unflattering portrait of himself, but he various realities and times of our world, King, author of such popular novels as It, 'Salm's Lot, The Shining, and The Stand, was taken to Northern Cumberland Memorial Hospital actually kills himself off. following the fortunes of gunslinger Roland of in Bridgton, where he was pronounced dead at 6;oa PM Saturday evening. He was 52 years old. A hospital source said the cause of death was extensive head I haven’t read many of King’s horror stories, Gilead and the three mismatched refugees from injuries. King’s family, which had gathered in part to celebrate Fathers New York in various dates in our 20th Century Day, is in seclusion tonight... but I’ve followed this series since the beginning, who have joined him. It’s once again lavishly and it’s kept me reading. As well as having a gift illustrated by Darrell Anderson. Susannah Dean, once the for plot and an eye for what makes readers (and viewers) jump, schizophrenic Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker, has now had her King has a cinematic style of writing that concentrates on body taken over by a new personality, Mia, and has come to a describing actions rather than what the characters are thinking - version of New York in 1999 to bear a child, Mordred - the son, this makes his work very suited for adaptation to the screen. This by demonic means, of Roland of Gilead, destined to kill Roland is less in evidence in the Dark Tower series, and much of this and prevent him from saving the Dark Tower. book goes on in Susannah’s head, as she battles with the Mia In the previous volume, Wolves of the Calla, where King personality. However, the Dark Tower has a wider role - King reworked the Seven Samurai / Magnificent Seven story, he started himself said of Book 4, Wizard and Glass, "I am coming to

25 Vector 237 • September/October 2004 understand that Roland's world actually contains all the others of beginning but now he’s doing it much more overtly, using The my making." Indeed, Black House (the 2001 sequel to Talisman Dark Tower to tie all his work together. Consequently, if you're a by Stephen King and Peter Straub) revealed more details about the King fan, this series is unmissable - if you're not a King fan, try Dark Tower and the Crimson King. King has apparently slipped The Cunslinger first. references to his other works into his books almost from the

Tanith Lee - Cast a Bright Shadow Tor UK, London, 2004, 431pp, £10.99, t/p, ISBN 1-4050-0634-X Reviewed by Penny Hill

The initial impression that we get is that this could be the story of unengaging, the worst-served being Lionwolf's opposite number, Saphay, a minor princess, kidnapped and raped by a God on her the woman Chillel who was created by one of the Gods purely to way to a political marriage; but Saphay never steps out of the have sex with as many men as possible. passive role and remains peripheral and marginalised. In the I was looking for clues as to the nature of the world this story Cinderella reversal section, where after working as a slave for was set in. The permanent winter and the secret doomsday Nabnish, she becomes head of the household, we are alienated weapons make it look like a post-apocalyptic world in which gods by her casual cruelty to Nabnish whom she enslaves in turn. are corporeal and powerful, magic and ghosts are possible. When Although Saphay's relationship to her three household Gods is I have read other fantastical works I've had no trouble believing in a central theme and provider of plot, the details remain unclear - gryphons and hippogriffs and other obviously imaginary and we don't know why she was chosen. She appears to be an active equally biologically impossible beasts and yet I must admit to participant in the situation and yet this is clearly described as rape having problems with the myth of the Lionwolf which is central to not romance. Later in the book, we meet Saffi - the mindless this world - I simply couldn't suspend my disbelief in the body cast off by Saphay when kidnapped - and this starts to raise biological impossibility. I had similar trouble with the giant flesh­ questions about character, individuality and identity but these are eating whale. As you do. never explored. Sadly, despite having been intrigued by previous Tanith Lee A major difficulty for plot and suspense is the infallible works, I didn't really like this very much and struggled to get protagonist NoName, child of the rape (later called through it. I can't see what merit there would be Lionwolf). Because he has no physical weakness in a whole trilogy. there is no sense of danger in anything that Thinking of a suitable age range for this book, happens to him. He is already aware of his own I found that the immature and undeveloped powers so there is no conflict or development characters would be unlikely to appeal to an there. As a character he remains one-dimensional. adult audience and yet the darkness of much of This is perhaps a result of him physically growing the content would make this unsuitable for twice as fast as normal humans - 20 years in 10 - anyone younger than a mature 14. My doctor leaving him mentally immature. He is, however, asked if this would be suitable for his 11 year old unlikeable without any of the redeeming qualities and I don't think so. There is too much of a child. The closest we get to any scenes of unpleasant sex, much of it non-consensual, and I emotional closeness is that between the infant found the various societies depicted all NoName and his mother Saphay as they cross the depressingly traditional. This is not examined or ice with Guri, the ghost of a hunter. Guri's role as explored in any way - just taken for granted. I'm reluctant mentor gives him a rare spark of uncomfortable with this and yet I wouldn't want individuality. a politically correct world or one where all the The other characters are undeveloped and good guys have 21st century liberal opinions.

Steve Lines & John B. Ford (eds.) - The Derelict of Death and other stories Rainfall Books, Calne, 2003, 1 51 pp, £7.99, p/b, ISBN 0-9540877-3-9

Joe Rattigan - Ghosts Far from Subtle Rainfall Books, calne, 2003, 68pp, £8.00, p/b, isbn 0-9546178-1-9

Paul Kane — Funny Bones Rainfall Books, Calne, 2003, 171pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 1-894953-14-2 Reviewed by Simon Morden

Three more books from the Ford/Lines stable to be picked over in the explosive and vicious denouement. Finch has always been a this issue, after highly favourable reviews of earlier works in careful writer, concentrating on both plot and character, and this Vector 235. The Derelict of Death is an anthology of the wickedly is an excellent story. With contributions from Paul Kane, Sue macabre and grotesque that contains some genuinely brilliant and Phillips, Eddie Angerhuber, Richard Bennett and Steve Lines, scary stories, featuring authors from both sides of the Atlantic. together with a smattering of poetry, this collection is truly great. The title story, a collaboration between Simon Clark and John Ghosts Far from Subtle is much more of a curate's egg. Ford's Ford, is a haunting, supremely powerful tale of the last voyage of normally spot-on production values have slipped a little, with two the lenny Rose and the fate that befalls her crew. Imaginative, variations of the title on the cover and a third just inside. The six compassionate and intensely disturbing, Clark and Ford make this stories inside show that Rattigan can write, and write well. He one of the best horror shorts you'll find anywhere. 'The Dedicated builds atmosphere and tension superbly, but often lacks the drama to the Weird' by Mark Samuels also appears in his collection to complete what he starts. Black Altars, where Vector 235 described Samuels' writing as 'The Cursed Tree' is the best of the stories: Kate becomes “unfailingly sharp, with lucid prose and unflinching coolness". increasingly fixated with the dead tree in her new back garden, Michael Pendragon's 'The Curiosity Piece' deals with the and her husband's tale of psychological disintegration and extravagant Scarlotti and his amusing artefact. The story is short, possession is assured and potent. Arboreal menace also features in swift, and completely to the point. Paul Finch takes considerably 'The Dark Side of the Woods and 'In the Deep Dark Woods'. longer to tell his slow-burn 'Shadows in the Rafters'. This classic Council executive Walsh becomes lost in the forest he's planning mystery, set in Victorian England, stacks up the clues steadily until to bulldoze, and Angela loses her husband in similar

26 September/October 2004 • Vector 237 circumstances during a stay at a country hotel. Both stories go for ‘The Sheepshank Redemption’, ‘Temple of Deadly Danger’), they the walk, but never really reach their destination. ‘The Wrong battle with evil worms, weresheep, and Quayle’s arch-nemesis Side of the Tracks’ is better for plot progression and is again highly Siphilati. Attempting to cross Sherlock Holmes with Indiana Jones atmospheric, but the plight of poor commuter Hudson is too could have been an unmitigated disaster. However, the writing drawn out. ‘When She Calls’ is an urban nightmare of creeping manages to transcend mere pastiche and enters its own bizarre doom, but whilst the images are strong, the reason for the story is world where all the tropes of detective, Hammer and adventure missing. Likewise in the final tale, ‘Seen But Not Heard’. The films are ruthlessly abused with pithy asides and groan-worthy stories are probably all better than described, but for a reader who puns. ‘All the Rage’ - about a couture collection that runs amok - likes to sit on a three-legged stool, balancing on just two was is much more savage and sly, while ‘Dracula in Love’ provides a ultimately frustrating. neat twist to the conundrum faced by all vampires. Less successful Paul Kane’s Funny Bones is a collection of those rare beasts, were the ‘Bones Brothers’ and ‘The Last Temptation of Alice the humorous horror story. For those people who really dislike Crump’, but Kane can be forgiven much for the exuberance and this sub-genre, stop reading now, because Kane actually pulls the flair shown in Quayle and Pemberton’s triptych. rabbit out of the hat more often than not. [Available from 95 Compass Crescent, Old Whittington, The stars of the show are the two paranormal detectives Chesterfield, S41 9LX] Dalton Quayle and Humphrey Pemberton: in the three stories in which the bungling duo appear (‘Master of the White Worms’,

James Lovegrove - Gig PS Publishing, Harrogate, 2004, 138+129pp, £35.00, h/b, ISBN 1-902880-83-8 Reviewed by Dave M. Roberts

Gig is a novel consisting of two interconnected novellas, Gig: Mik revisiting a pivotal event from Mik’s childhood and introducing and Gig: Kim. These are published back to back (as per the old the abusive father, Gig: Mik amounts to little more than a day in Ace doubles), and we are told that they can be read in either the life of a band at the end of a long tour. It’s no big surprise they order. There is little to push the reader to either one or the other don’t all get on as well as they might. Gig: Kim, on the other first. hand, is a much denser affair. As she moves through the city we The band God Dog is ending a long tour by returning to their are introduced to the nostalgia of the place. There are gangs who home city, where they have never performed, for an end-of-tour are associated with particular bands, but all from the sixties. The stadium concert. Both novellas cover the day of the concert from Doom Rats are a group of God Dog fans who are only interested just before the band’s arrival to the concert itself. Gig: Mik is in the two albums they made before leaving Rotor City. Kim’s centred on the band’s lead singer Mik Dyer, Gig: Kim on God alienation from all of these groups becomes representative of her Dog’s most obsessive fan Kim Reid. alienation from life generally and there is a very real sense of a Both halves take you on a tour of Rotor City. Mik to trace his person who is on a mission she knows to be wrong, yet finds childhood with his closest (possibly only) friend Dave, to provide herself unable to move from her chosen path. The city represents background of just why it is that God Dog have never played the past, which is paradoxically the one place from which you there and Kim in order to carry out instructions she supposes she cannot escape and to which you cannot return. Mik and Kim are received from Mik during a drug trip. placed at opposite ends of this dilemma. The book is self-consciously structured and plays heavily on There are hints that the instructions Kim received may not its palindromic form, with the two halves moving from the cover have been as illusory as it would first appear. This, along with to the climactic events at the centre of the book. The chapters are much else leaches between the two stories. They complement paired across the two stories and Kim is portrayed as an each other well, and the reading of Gig: Kim is greatly enhanced equivalent but inverted Mik, the obsessive musician and the by the reading of Gig: Mik. I strongly suspect the reverse would obsessive fan. Palindromes are distributed liberally throughout, have been true had I read the stories the other way round. most obviously in the chapter titles, which if you like looking for The way the novel is presented may be a little tricksy, but I’m that sort of thing is quite fun. There is a danger, though, that this not convinced that it would have worked better in any other form. can get in the way of the actual story, and it can occasionally This is an intriguing, if not entirely successful book, but its merits become irritating. far outweigh its flaws. This structure proves to be slightly unbalanced as Gig: Kim is, [Available from www.pspublishing.co.uk] on its own, a much stronger novella than Gig: Mik. Apart from

Ian McDonald - River of Gods Simon & Schuster, London, 2004, 583pp, £12.99, t/b, ISBN 0-7432-5670-0 Reviewed by Paul N. Billinger

A body floats down the Ganga river: India but of m-star theory, a message from the past (which may turning in the current, slowly also be from the future), and the fate of a small idol on a Varanasi unwrapping a sari and disappearing roundabout. The novel interweaves the tales of ten diverse and into the early morning light. An dispersed people - including a Krishna Cop, stand-up comic, ordinary body in an extraordinary drop-out genius, ambitious reporter, prime-ministerial aide and a place: Varanasi in the year 2047, a nute (surgically altered to be gender-neutral) - all played out body dumped in the river by the against the backdrop of a looming war, ostensibly over water, young wannabe-gangster Shiv. As he between two Indian states. drives off to sell the ovaries he These tales are not told in a rigid, formulaic way, but much removed from the body we are more organically, weaving in and through each other. Shiv’s introduced to the city and to this future India, a place of heat, journey into the crush-hour traffic of Varanasi exemplifies this, noise and crowds - a place of seeming chaos. The discarded body being without compromise: the sights, sounds and smells of the works beautifully as a potent metaphor for this book, city come at a tremendous rush; full immersion in the Indian incorporating life, death and rebirth. culture. Initially this is made even more daunting by McDonald’s McDonald’s captivating novel is not only an exploration of use of language, mixing English, Hindi, Hinglish and construct

27 Vector 237 • September/October 2004 words in a torrential, free-flowing, rhythmic way. thing she was discovering about this alien world. There is a temptation to analyse this, to break the It only looked like chaos. Things got done and flow and attempt to understand each individual, done well”. And things within the narrative are unfamiliar word (and to anyone with little done very well indeed, with the plotlines mixing knowledge of India, its myths, religions and and building towards a climax, both of the history, there will be many). To do this would be individual and combined stories, often in wrong: on first reading trust the author and unexpected and poignantly tragic ways. plunge yourself in the flow. On repeat readings - McDonald's most memorable previous novel, and this is a book which demands more than Chaga, has some similarities to River of Cods in one - there is less urge to know, precisely, each that it shows the effect of science on an Earth word's meaning and I suspect that this should culture (Kenya in the former), an approach which not be done. Although a glossary is included this is much more successful than when he is using a appears deliberately vague and incomplete (it more traditional far-future setting as in Out on would be better to use the glossary in any of Blue Six or Ares Express. Chaga and, possibly, William Dalrymple's India books). Necroville are superb novels but River of Cods With this multitude of narratives and lush exceeds them both: never has McDonald written language the book could be confusing and hard one which is quite so brilliant or pulsating with to follow. It is not. Each chapter signals the lead life. Here, he truly captures the marvellous, character and with their strength and vitality they chaotic energy of India, which when melded with such an soon become individually memorable and easily differentiated. imaginative and original storyline has produced one of the most The initial confusion on first exposure is found not just by the captivating and enjoyable books of the year. reader but by the characters as well, with, for example, Lisa - an American scientist new to India - coming to realise “this was a

George Mann - The Human Abstract Telos, Tolworth, 2004, 1 33pp, £7.99, p/b, ISBN 1-903889-65-0 Reviewed by Niall Harrison

It is often said that science fiction is a genre in dialogue with itself. mannered Mihajlovic cast in the role of reluctant investigator. It's true that ideas and themes recur, as authors respond to the Mann's writing is good (his description sometimes better, his works of their predecessors. In fact, there are surely those who dialogue sometimes worse), his subject is interesting, and his would argue that this strong connection with the past is (perhaps pacing is brisk. I have some reservations about the ending, which paradoxically) one of science fiction's most appealing qualities. comes perhaps a touch too close to normalising for my taste, but The Human Abstract - George Mann's first published fiction, on the whole this is solid work. although not his first published writing - takes us to Copernicus, a However, for me the most interesting aspect of the book was quiet backwater in a human-colonised galaxy, to confront a not the feel of it. The Human Abstract is set a long time from now dissimilar historical dialogue on a societal scale. The prologue, in (reference is made to our sun going nova), but it seems to me that the form of an excerpt from a history of the colonies written by it remains a defiantly old-fashioned style of future. AIs exist, for one Friederik Roch, informs the reader that the colony was first instance, but if there has been a singularity it hasn't affected terraformed by machines, not humans. Then, in the story's people's day-to-day lives; their affairs feel contemporary, albeit present, we are introduced to our protagonist, Rehan Mihajlovic, with a shiny technological coating. And whilst Mann is clearly who muses that books are 'footprints or impressions, the graffiti of aware of recent sf - most explicitly Stone by Adam Roberts - I history [...] they allow the dead to speak'. think I also caught references to older antecedents as diverse as Consequently, it's not a great surprise to find that Mihajlovic is The Fifth Head of Cerberus and the later Foundation novels. a dealer in antiquarian books, and that the plot, initially at least, Not original, then? Perhaps not. It's certainly not cutting-edge; centres around the sale of a notable collection after the death of Mann works within the genre, unswayed by slipstreams or its owner. Soon enough we find that, amongst other things, the interstices. Still, no story is truly original, and The Human Abstract collection contains a first edition of the Roch, and that it differs is an enjoyable remix of some common and not-so-common from the version we were shown in the prologue. Cross­ ideas. Whilst it may not break new ground it reminds us, with referencing with some other titles in the collection leads pride, of the importance of our genre's heritage. Mihajlovic to conclude that some events in the colony's past have [Available from www.telos.co.uk] indeed been written out of history, and sets him on the path towards discovering what those events were. Thereafter the story unfolds as a mystery, with the mild-

L. E. Modesitt - Darknesses Orbit, London, 2004, 551 pp, £7.99, p/b, ISBN 1-84149-259-0 Reviewed by Lynne Bispham

This is only the second volume in The Corean Chronicles, and yet militia have, for reasons of politics and trade, and against the will there is already a discernable familiarity about the plot in which of the troopers, become part of the forces of Lanchrona, and are Alucius, a herder of the Iron Valleys, conscripted into the militia, now to be known as the Northern Guard to distinguish them from leaves his home to fight an invading enemy force, destroys them Lanchrona's Southern Guard. and their magical weapons with his Talent and, with the help of Alucius finds himself made Overcaptain of the squads of the mysterious beings known as soarers, destroys a greater, Northern Guards who will be sent to Deforya to defend it against magical evil. This time around, the enemy is Aellyan Edyss, the the advancing nomads. Summoned to a meeting with the Lord­ nomad warlord and leader of the Myrmidons, who has discovered Protector of Lanchrona, he discovers a new enemy residing in the and resurrected the flying mounts and skylances of the original Lord-Protector's palace. From the first, Alucius is aware that his pre-Cataclysm Myrmidon warriors, and is intent on conquest, being sent to Deforya is not as simple as it seems, for he faces beginning with the land of Deforya. Meanwhile, the Iron Valleys several attempts on his life that he surmises must have more to do

28 September/October 2004 • Vector 237 with his Talent than his position in the militia. such consternation, remains a two-dimensional figure. The Lord­ Just as in the first volume of this series, the reader is given a Protector fares a little better, but to a large extent the creation of detailed account of the political infighting, economy, and believable characters has been neglected in favour of descriptions geography of the world of Corus. The reader is also given an of journeys, places and weapons. The overall plot of the series incredible amount of detail about the daily lives of Alucius and does advance in that Alucius discovers more about the evil that his troopers - Alucius spends a deal of time washing his clothes - threatens Corus, and it is made clear to the reader that he is more which holds up the action. The real problem with all this detail, than just a simple herder, but the structure of this book is so however, is that it results in the reader knowing a great deal about similar to that of its predecessor that it does not bode well for Alucius and very little about any of the other characters whose future volumes. Fantasy is often accused of being formulaic and it actions are crammed into short chapters between the longer does not need books that add to this largely erroneous opinion of sections featuring the protagonist. Aellyan Edyss, who is causing the genre.

Caiseal Mor - The Well of Yearning Pocket Books, London, 2004, 51 5pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 0-7434-6856-2 Reviewed by Lesley Hatch

The story here is narrated by an old storytelling woman, to an accompanying his superior, a scribe, who is dying. The young unidentified and unnamed listener whose reason for visiting is not monk is entrusted with a quest to find two particular ancient made clear. In any event, he (or she) provides the framework for books, which are desired by several people. Add to this the fact the events that the storyteller relates, and a strange set of events that the monk has occasional glimpses of the future, and things they are. begin to get complicated. The tale takes place some time after the Crusades, and centres And then you get the young woman from the Middle East around the quest for vengeance (amongst other things) undertaken seeking a cure for her husband's amnesia; an immortal priestess; a by a Knight of the Hospital following his expulsion from the order host of Redcaps (servants to the Queen of the Night); a couple of for failing in his duties. He blames this on one man, another talking ravens; and various other characters to create a backdrop Templar, who was born in Ireland and raised there, and the for the main action, which is to defeat the Normans and the expelled Knight travels there to complete his quest. However, Redcaps once and for all. once there, he discovers that things are not all they seem. I wish I could say that the story worked for me, as a whole, There are ancient forces on the move, with the Queen of the but I am sorry to say that it did not. Somehow the main story got Night (one of the ancient deities of Ireland) amassing her armies lost amongst a host of minor incidents, such as the random so that she can attack the mortals of the land, and she enlists the transformation of various Normans into trees, and the pursuit of help of the aforementioned Knight in her plans. She promises him the young Benedictine for the books he carries. The novel the High-Kingship of Ireland and the crown of England if he will concludes with one quest ending and another starting for some of help her. Unfortunately, he has, prior to meeting her, unleashed the characters, with another two books to follow in this series. I the fury of the Watchers, two immortals who have been found the story a little confusing, and the cast of characters was so imprisoned in a well for centuries (in worm shape) and they are vast that it had me checking back to see who was who and what now free to rampage wherever they see fit. had happened to them on more than one occasion. Not a book Then there is a young Benedictine monk, in Ireland for me, I'm afraid.

Larry Niven - Ringworld's Children Orbit, London, 2004, 267pp, £16.99, h/b, ISBN 1-84149-170-5 Reviewed by Andrew A. Adams

Ringworld is one of the classics of ‘Big Science’ sf. An enormous three had shown signs of trying to fix mistakes in previous books, structure creating a sense of wonder and allowing an author huge with a long, rambling tale full of sexual fantasies and other wish­ scope for action and adventure. Unfortunately, Larry Niven's fulfilment. Luckily, Ringworld's Children is a much shorter and original specification for his Ringworld had some problems and so more realistic tale. The sex is kept to a minimum and doesn't get he keeps returning to the place in order to fix his creation. Thus, in the way of the plot. The writing is much tighter, although at there are now four books in the Ringworld sequence from 1970, times it seems as if the author is impatient to get to the 1981, 1996 and 2004. denouement and the breakneck pace skips over major events with Ringworld's Children starts very soon after the end of The a bare description. In fact, in many ways the mistakes Niven Ringworld Throne. Since I'd read the previous ones I decided to seems to be trying to fix this time are as much the poor writing of read Children without going back to them. While it is possible to The Ringworld Throne as the plot and science holes. While read it this way I don't actually recommend it. Much better to read maybe swinging too far the other way at times, this has led to a at least The Ringworld Throne again unless you have an excellent very readable book. The technobabble is kept to a minimum, memory for plot developments. Niven gives sufficient information although much of that is possible because the ‘magic’ level of about the background to explain what's going on, without technology is already well established in both Known Space and becoming boring, but I'm sure I missed out on some of the on the Ringworld itself. The plot is driven by character rather than context. by technology, which is a welcome development from one of the What it would be impossible to do is to read Ringworld's classic techno-sf writers. In itself this inspires me to check out Children without ever having read the rest of the sequence, and some of his other recent books, since I'd pretty much given up on indeed without having read some of his other Known Space Niven after Throne. sequence. This is one of the problems with large ‘Future History’ The plot manages to have some intriguing twists and turns, type sets. It can become impossible for an author to write grand although because of the breakneck pace the treachery, betrayal scope pieces without having to rely on information from previous and personal agenda don't have quite the impact they might have books. To really grasp what's going on here one has to know if more time had been spent building the characters’ relationships. about Kzin, ARM, Protectors, Pierson's Puppeteers and a bunch of It's difficult to care that someone gets betrayed by a person other stuff. So, not one for Larry Niven newcomers. they've been lying to since they met a few days ago, especially Having been rather disappointed with The Ringworld Throne, since both sides were, or should have been, very wary about their I approached Ringworld's Children with some trepidation. Book circumstances anyway.

29 Vector 237 • September/October 2004

Known Space can be a fun place to visit, although I wouldn't that's Niven's intent. Certainly there's a final explanation of Teela want to live there. If you've read the rest then this won't be a Brown's 'Luck' that pays homage to Dawkin's genetic theories as disappointment, although needing to re-read The Ringworld well as tying in nicely with the Protector background in Known Throne first might put some people off. I hesitate to say that this Space. will complete the Ringworld sequence, although it looks like A satisfying read that keeps you turning the pages.

Marianne De Pierres - Code Noir Orbit, London, 2004, 311 pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 1-84149-257-4 Reviewed by Colin Bird

Following swiftly on from Nylon Angel we have the second Dr Anna Schaum, the scientist who accidentally released the volume of a trilogy of Parish Plessis adventures, complete with a Eskalim parasite, is still alive and a devoted follower of Loyl Daac. map of the chaotic Australian megacity, the Tert. The author's Parish follows her leads into Dis, and finds a seemingly website promises the third volume in six months or so. uninhabitable slum town covered with wild-tek, bio-mechanical Parish may have survived the gangwars of the preceding book pollution. As she gets closer to her target she realises she has to with her abrasive charms intact but the Cabal turn up come to terms with what's happening to her body before she can unexpectedly on her doorstep demanding goma (blood debt) for tackle the challenge the Cabal has given her. saving her ass. They want her to find some missing karadji For fans of the first book this is more of the same with a twist (gangster shaman) and on the way she can execute Loyl Daac, an of darkness as Parish battles her demons both internally and out ex-Cabal member who experiments with genetic manipulation. on the mean streets of the Tert, this time delving into some new Meanwhile, the clock is ticking down to King Tide, a mother of a areas of the megacity. As the characters and setting have already flood coming the Tert's way in a few days. been established De Pierres concentrates on developing the plot Parish Plessis remains the same resourceful Amazonian and there's not much time for background detail so you have to character with attitude to spare. But in this book she's changing, keep up. The end result is a tad less involving than Nylon Angel - especially as she battles the parasitic Eskaalim which infected her the thrill of discovery is gone. However, Parish Plessis remains an in Nylon Angel. The Eskaalim is an alien creature (whose origin is enjoyable creation and De Pierres has a knack for spinning her never really explained) that feeds off adrenaline and causes its tales at breakneck pace. host to lose control and become a shape-shifter. The Cabal offer Parish the hope of finding a cure and she soon finds evidence that

Stefan Petrucha - The Tunnel at the End of the Light" Telos, Tolworth, 2004, W4pp, £7.99, p/b, isbn 1-903889-37-5 Reviewed by Niall Harrison

The Tunnel at the End of the Light is what you might describe as odd about the man, but what? second-generation sharecropping. It's one of a number of Telos Petrucha, from his biography, seems primarily to be a novellas chronicling the ongoing adventures of American ex-GI screenplay and comics writer, and this novella has a feel more Honore Lechasseur and his amnesiac companion Emily Blandish. commonly associated with those media: long on action and short The characters were introduced in one of the Doctor Who novellas on atmosphere. His monsters, strange subterranean creatures with for which Telos is best known (The Cabinet of Light), and as you elements of dog, lizard and ape, are effective, and his pacing is might expect from this fact, these adventures involve a certain brisk, with just the right amount of story to fill out the length of the amount of time-travel. book (although there is a slight feeling that plot coupons are handed Lechasseur, you see, is a 'time-sensitive': he can visualise the out just a little too conveniently). The weaknesses here are perhaps timeline of any person he comes into contact with, seeing past and more those of the material than the writer; as ongoing characters, future events superimposed on to the present. Blandish, meanwhile Lechasseur and Blandish can only develop in the smallest of is a 'time-channeller'. She cannot perceive time in the way that increments, and somewhat inevitably they have a nemesis who Lechasseur can, but she can move through it. Together, they fight turns out to have a hand in the foul play. The story builds to a crime! Or at least, on the evidence of this offering, solve horror- and classic moral choice - one of the common time-travel questions, scifi- tinged mysteries featuring monsters that wouldn't be out of along the lines of 'if you could kill Hitler as a baby, would you?' - place in a standard Doctor Who story. but the dilemma is simplistically drawn, with no real doubt about As The Tunnel at the End of the Light opens, our heroes are the outcome. making a place for themselves in post-war London, working partly Still, it's a diverting enough adventure, and for the Telos as private investigators, partly as all-round fixers. Early in the story, audience, reading with a greater knowledge of the series and the they are approached by a man who is convinced that his life is in background, The Tunnel at the End of the Light will probably prove danger. The man, going by the name of Randolph Crest, turns out to an enjoyable read. Others, however, are advised that they may find be a poet, and certain that he'll be the next victim of a savage it unsatisfying. murderer whose actions have been reported in the press. More [Available from www.telos.co.uk] intriguingly, Crest tweaks Lechasseur's timesense; there's something

Philip Pullman - Lyra's Oxford David Fickling Books, Oxford, 2003, 66pp (+ fold out map), £9.99, h/b, ISBN 0-385-60699-0 Nicholas Tucker - Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman Wizard Books, Duxford, 2003, 207pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 1-84046-482-8 Reviewed by Andrew M. Butler

Philip Pullman has become a phenomenon in children's fiction, course have enormous crossover audiences of children and adults. rivalled only by Jacqueline Wilson and trumped by Harry Potter Both have also begun to accrete the barnacles of critical and its merchandising. With films on the way of His Dark Materials, commentary - with probably about ten critical books on Potter by he may yet overtake Potter. Pullman and Rowling have both put now and one and a third devoted to Pullman. The third is the children's fiction on the news agenda, have won awards and of section on Pullman by Millicent Lenz in Alternative Worlds in

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Fantasy Fiction (2001) and the one is by Nicholas Tucker. is clearly not an academic book, rather something that the lay Tucker is a former teacher and educational psychologist, and is reader and even the late teenager should be able to read from and currently a lecturer at the University of Sussex. He has written enjoy. widely on both classic and contemporary children's fiction, Towards the end of his discussion of the trilogy, Tucker notes contributing to such specialist journals as Signal and Children's how, unlike Tolkien's work, we don't get the endless details, Literature in Education. Here he attempts to survey the entire terrain languages and histories of Lyra's world. Perhaps he wrote too soon, of Pullman's fiction, from Calatea (1978) to The Amber Spyglass for Pullman has compiled Lyra's Oxford, including a short story, an (2000) and Puss in Boots (2000), sometimes bringing his entry from a tourist guide about Jericho, Oxford, a brochure for a background in psychology to bear. For example, he suggests that cruiseship, a map of Oxford and a postcard - although the latter is Pullman's early loss of his father in an aircraft and then his from Mary Malone's Oxford. acquisition of a stepfather could explain the treatment of fathers in I've long thought that the delay to the publication and the the novels, and that his relationship with his mother, who at times eventual length of The Amber Spyglass suggested some reluctance seems to resent the young Pullman's presence in her London flat, on Pullman's part to complete the narrative which had found him. echoes the relationship of Lyra and Mrs Coulter and The Broken The possible endings - and if you haven't read the trilogy and plan Bridge's Ginny and her mother. He also links the demons of the to, stop reading now - were that Lyra and Will live happily ever trilogy to Jung's notion of the anima/animus, although stops short of after or that they part. Wish-fulfilment or tragedy. Pullman, stuck in connecting the Spectres of Cittagazza with the Jungian shadow. the logic of his novel, chose the Douglas Sirk melodrama route of Inevitably in such a book, some of the novels are rather separating the star-cross'd lovers and ensuring that It Could Never skimmed over: Calatea merits two pages, and the disowned The Be. (Presumably given the many-worlds theorem, there is another Haunted Storm is mentioned but not even named. All the other universe where It Actually Was.) The best that Lyra seems to be able books are given a plot summary and some discussion, but about a to hope for, having now been sent to school, is a blue-stocking quarter of the volume is devoted to the Sally Lockhart quartet and existence. Surely Lyra deserves more than that? half to the His Dark Materials trilogy. This is probably as it should But just as Pullman suggested in his Locus interview with Tanya be. Tucker notes the increasing radicalisation of Sally, and like Brown that he wanted to write more Sally Lockhart books (and many readers is disappointed by the less radical politics of The Tin Tucker quotes this from Tanya's website), so it seems likely that Princess (1990), where Pullman steps back from what teeters on the there will be more Lyra books. Whether this proves to be a edge of preaching to a more traditional adventure in an imaginary mistaken yielding to public demand, or an artistic triumph, remains European country. to be seen. I confess my doubts whilst itching to read it. In the The bulk of the book is an analysis of His Dark Materials, with meantime we have this teaser, a short story called “Lyra and the useful plot summaries of all three volumes for those who may not Birds" in which Lyra leads a witch's dymon to the house of have read them recently, and a discussion of Pullman's most Sebastian Makepeace in the Jericho area of Oxford. Presumably the important literary forebears: John Milton, William Blake and new adventures will explain the identities of these two characters, Heinrich von Kleist, whose “On the Marionette Theatre" is and will involve a meeting at the Cafe Antalya, Suleiman Square, reprinted from the Times Literary Supplement translation as an Smyrna, at 11 am on Monday 11 May. If Pullman has been reading appendix. There is also a useful comparison of the trilogy to the his T.S. Eliot then one of the parties will be a merchant, dealing in Harry Potter phenomenon, and an intriguing examination of C. S. currants. Lewis's work that concludes - rightly I think - greater kin between This is a slight volume, and the story is not Pullman's finest the two than Pullman's comments might suggest. hour. The postcard at first sight could be in the running for the most A shortcoming of the book is that, aside from occasional notes boring in the world, were it not that its four images are of Mary's of precursors to the trilogy, there is no sense of Pullman's oeuvre college and the street where she lived, the place where Will cut his either as an organic whole or a series of contradictions. Tucker way through into another universe and the bench in the Botanical notes that The Ruby in the Smoke (1985) begins with Sally Lockhart Gardens where he and Lyra commune across universes. The page about to kill a man and that The White Mercedes/The Butterfly from the tourist guide is amusing, and the verisimilitudinous adverts and other materials on the map are also satisfying (and reminiscent Tattoo (1992) begins with Chris Marshall meeting the girl he will kill, but does not link the two, nor does he link this to Will Parry as of the now defunct illustrated version of Count Karlstein (1991)). I'm not convinced that this is worth a tenner, but it is in the end a murderer at the start of The Subtle Knife (1997). The discussion of rather pleasing object to have. free will, predestination and physics in Clockwork (1996) could also be profitably linked with these themes in the trilogy. It is also a shame that there is no index. Tucker is clearly a champion of Pullman's work, not feeling let down by the ending of The Amber Spyglass, and disagreeing only with some of Pullman's statements on organised religion. Despite the book's wealth of references, this

Rudy Rucker - Frek and the Elixir Tor, New York, 2004, 476pp, $27.95, h/b, ISBN 0-765-31058-9 Reviewed by Gary Wilkinson

It's 3003 and the world is a very different place. Almost every with his mother and two sisters but deep down he knows single animal and plant species that we know was eliminated something is not right. Suddenly his life changes when he finds a hundreds of years ago by the all-powerful NuBioCom. They even strange device under his bed. This object draws the attention of purged the DNA records from all databases. Now there are only a the 'counsellors' (read cops) who serve Gov, the controller of the few heavily genetically engineered species. People live in houses nearest city. This object is a 'flying saucer': inside is an alien that are grown like trees, their only pets are dogs - that all look cuttlefish that tells Frek he will save the world and find the Elixir the same - and they eat from 'anyfruit' trees and cut slices from that will restore all of Earth's natural species. Soon Frek finds their 'anymeat' that continuously replenishes itself. himself on the run to escape having a lobotomy at the hands of The book's hero is 12 year old Frek. He's unusual in that he the counsellors. He first goes to the mysterious Grulloo woods full comes from a single-parent household. His father, chiding against of unusual experiments in genetic engineering. From there Frek the authority and conformity of the current regime, left for the will go on into space and beyond into parallel universes to fulfil asteroids several years ago. Frek seems to live a happy enough life his quest.

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In many ways I found this a frustrating book as it does not tail make the hobbits of Lord of the Rings look like hard-bitten seem to know what it wants to be. It has a child protagonist and in orcs. I'm afraid I found their saccharine presence utterly many ways it is a children's novel, but it uses a huge number of nauseating. made-up words (like the 'anytree' example above) and advanced There's a humorous, knowing tone to Frek and the Elixir and scientific concepts that any child is going to become frustrated there is some fairly well-aimed satire targeting such diverse topic with it they keep having to flick to the glossary at the back. Any as corporate culture, fashion, small-town conformity and advanced science is indistinguishable from magic and this seems television among others, but this does not really go far enough to unable to distinguish itself from fantasy. It has the classic quest classify it as an actual satirical novel. Frek's family is well-drawn plot structure for a start - Rucker has obviously been studying his and Frek himself is an appealing character. However, in the end Hero's Journey. this one just did not work for me, continually falling between two It's also unbelievably twee. Even fairy tales need a bit of grit stools. and beef to them. The 'grulloo' - genetically engineered intelligent 'kritters' with only a human-like head and arms plus a

Caroline Stevermer - A Scholar of Magics Tor, New York, 2004, 300pp, $19.95, h/b, ISBN 0-765-30308-6 Reviewed by Pamela Stuart

Imagine a fictitious University in an Edwardian England which aim is to force the researcher Dr. Fell to leave his projects and gradually becomes apparent as situated on an alternate history­ Time Studies to take up his important place as one of the Wardens line... of the World, a duty which he prefers to avoid. Into the idyllic cloistered life of the all-male Glasscastle Samuel and Jane soon find themselves united in trying to trace University, where magic is taught against a background of Latin Dr. Fell, who has vanished, and whose rooms have been chants and pealing bells, where top hats take the place of mortar­ ransacked by an unknown villain in a bowler hat. Also on his trail boards, and most areas are out of bounds to strangers, is are two of his students who desperately need their final marks transplanted a solitary American sharpshooter, Samuel Lambert, before the end of term. While they are still trying to trace him, the employed as a technician in the top-secret Agincourt project. Provost also vanishes, ostensibly en route to Ludlow, and it Totally barred from magical studies because 'no American can appears that both have been abducted by someone who wants the learn magic; if they were capable, then they could not have secret weapon developed by the Agincourt project. crossed the water in the first place", he knows only that when While Samuel and Jane try to trace the missing men, the called upon he must fire whatever weapons they hand him at the missing documents and the secret weapon, using such normal targets they set up. He is enchanted by the place but totally barred things as trains, motor-cars and policemen, the villains are playing from entering as a student; not only is he American, he can't dirty with magic, and using that secret weapon for evils its speak Latin either. designers never intended. Enter the Provost's sister Jane, from France, where she teaches A lightweight story, but gently amusing. A good choice for a mathematics at a women's University, which also teaches magic. long train-journey or those interminable hours at the airport She drives a motor-car, too, suitably attired in goggles, gauntlets waiting for your flight. and veiled hat, and soon sweeps Lambert off his feet. Her main

Christopher Varian - Dr Tim (Book One) Etompro, Southampton USA, 2003, 110pp, £7.65, p/b, ISBN 0-9721091-0-2 Reviewed by Gary Wilkinson

Well, this odd. The description on the back cover runs as left me very much with a puzzled 'eh?'. Actually I think this follows: 'Book One documents the journey of Dr. Tim an would have run better if, like a lot of these sort of cartoons, it had unassuming genius on the run for what he knows. Travel with Dr been run one at a time in some sort of publication or daily on the Tim across the globe eluding capture. Follow Dr. Tim through the internet. Even the sublime Far Side (which I think Dr Tim may be galaxy as he tries to return to earth. Watch Dr Tim escape danger aspiring to) loses its impact and humour if many are read one after armed only with a nervous stomach and a No. 2 pencil." Well. the other. sort of. The cartoons themselves are drawn with a simple but Physically it is a series of cartoons - one a page - with a appealing style, Photoshop shaded with grey. This is a pity as I caption underneath. These run into a loose, very loose, plot. The think some inventive use of colour would have made them much 'story' they tell is of Dr Tim, short and cute (who reminded me of more interesting and the 'greyness' definitely brings down some the old children's cartoon character Bod) as he sort of battles with of the more wacky visual ideas. However this would have evil scientists and then travels to alien worlds. Various running probably been prohibitively expensive. I could be wrong, but Dr characters are introduced - including a 50s thug, a femme Tim has all the appearances of either being a self-published book fatale/love interest, an evil nemesis and an alien - for a few or at the very least published by a very small press. cartoons, then mysteriously dropped. I'm sure these cartoons are Overall Dr Tim is very cute but, for me, just not funny. You supposed to be funny. However this is humour, Jim, but not as we might have differing opinions and humour is very subjective. (I, know it. To be fair some actually do raise a smile. There is one I for instance, loath Garfield but it's very popular). You can found quite funny where Tim is staring into a 'magic shop' which however see for yourself if Dr Tim would appeal by checking out has a prominently displaced voodoo doll of himself riddled with some sample pages via the website at etompro.com. pins with the caption: 'This explains a lot'. However, the majority

Mark Walker - Amida: A Novel Pineapple Publications, Amersham, 2004, 269pp, £14.99, p/b, ISBN 0-9547473-0-5 Reviewed by K. V. Bailey

Formally titled 'a novel', this is the story of the siege of Amida, Persian Sassanid empire found their expansionist surge which occurred in the 4th century A.D. when forces of the Neo- southwards into what is now Iraq impeded by this Roman frontier

32 September/October 2004 • Vector 237 fortress town. It is straight, not alternative, history, based on Marcellus and Horatius are of different temperaments, Marcellus accounts of the contemporary historian Amianus, but holds always on the offensive, Horatius favouring defensive tactics - additional interest for a reviewer and readers of genre literature that is until he mounts a foray to rescue Helena from a death both for its form and for its exploration of the numinous sentence. The usages of ballista and siege tower are described in experiences of many of its characters. The narration of these detail, the latter device having the final say. experiences, as well as of the progress of the siege, is through first- Historically, the Neo-Persian Sassanid empire did not last person documentation: letters, exhortations, sermons, soliloquies, long, and Rome was in irreversible decay. Mark Walker so shapes recounted dreams and visions. There are passages of dialogue his novel as to mirror the inevitable decline of great powers, between the garrison commander Horatius, last of his legendary giving expression to this theme particularly in the ‘Ecstatic Vision line, and Lars Familiaris, the line's household god; and there are of the Future’ of the Mithraic High Priest, Magus. The revelation is manifestations of the deific entity Mithras. Here, then, is a strand that monotheistic religions of dominating powers are exclusive of metaphysical and often fantastic imagery woven into the and cruelly intolerant, while pluralistic faiths, embracing a historic action, episodes of which are actually observed and pantheon of gods, nymphs of the streams and forest-dwelling recounted by the ghostly Persian ally, Prince Atrabates, battle-slain presences, are infinitely more tolerant, offering a joyful existence. early in the story. Symbolically apt is the fantasised fate of the Lars figurine, plucked The plot pivots around several personal involvements: the from the rubble of Amida by a mahout of the Persian elephants avenging of Atrabates; the hostility existing between the Italian- and eventually taken on to the Orient, where, it speculates, "I may Roman tribune, Horatius, and the Gallic-Roman tribune, be accepted alongside all the strange gods of India [i]n a place Marcellus; above all, the love affair of Horatius and Helena, she where every village and every household still has its own being the wife of a Roman officer who has changed sides and is protecting deity." now in the Persian camp. Much of the progress of the siege is [Available from www.pineapplepubs.co.uk] reflected in letters between the lovers, carried through the lines by Helena's maidservant. These, and such passages as Marcellus's address to his troops, contain swathes of personal back-story, slowing down the main narrative but filling out the characters.

Ian Watson - Mockymen Golden Gryphon Press, Urbana (USA), 2003, 324pp, $26.95, h/b, ISBN 1-930846-21-5 Reviewed by L. J. Hurst

It's not a question of what Ian Watson benign. Then, as the stories start tying up, reincarnation comes has been reading - it's a question of back. Reincarnation, of course, is another way in which an what he has been thinking. Who else intelligence takes its place in a body, that body normally being a could have combined reincarnated baby in the womb. Perhaps, though, if the Mockymen can insert Nazis, British secret agents, and themselves in empty adults, so can floating Nazi spirits: the mind-stealing aliens - thrown them Mockymen's way is not the only way. It just requires knowing together - and then let them fight it how the Nazis would do it. Well, we know how they do it; we've out? And who but Ian Watson would read about occult rites in the first part of the book; the question is, have provided each of them with an can something be done before the Mockymen put their big plan apparently rational reason for their into action? actions, even if none of them know it at the time? Nor might any At this point it is worth making a diversion as great as between other of our authors, in sf or out, throw in such extraordinary the first two parts of Mockymen to mention Eva-Marie Liffner's historical revisionism - Mockymen includes a major rehabilitation Camera (Harvill, 2003) because her novel (first published in of Vidkun Quisling. Swedish in 2001) is a thriller with a similar Scandinavian occult Watson is not alone in this way of working - other titles underpinning. Unfortunately she does not carry off Watson's trick coming from the small Golden Gryphon Press, such as Nancy of stealing the occult roots - the thesis of Camera is that in Kress's Nothing Human, seem to have the same underlying Edwardian London a Swede joins a group of Theosophists principles in examining what it is to be human, and perhaps the involved in murder. Actually, they were just a group of half- same near-future history (it is bleak). Equally, with some of his pathetic, half lunatic dead-beats and I assume that Ms Liffner has earlier works now being reissued, readers struck by the originality misremembered some of the Masonic readings of the ‘Jack the of Mockymen will be able to discover that leaps of imagination Ripper’ murders and misattributed them. That would not matter so hidden by intellectual sleights of hand are a feature of Ian much if she had managed Watson's tricks of taking possession of Watson's work (Death Hunter, extraordinarily, is based on a piece ideas and using them to his own ends. of linguistic confusion that argues that death and dying are not This is where Ian Watson's extraordinary powers come into related). Since the blurb on the inside sleeve is a long synopsis of their own. The whole premise of the battle against the Mockymen the novel I would infer that his editor at Golden Gryphon is more has to be Nazi revisionism - how could the most ghastly occult interested in ideas as well; otherwise the jacket would play up the forces that might have underlaid Hitler and his gang be used in thriller elements of the novel - which starts with a long horror the fight back? Essentially this is a fantastic creation because Ian story involving occult rites in Norway intended to reactivate the Watson seems to have created his own Occult Roots Of Nazism. Nazi spirit and lead to a child being tortured (this was the He mentions real individuals but they are not the individuals Interzone story ‘Secrets’). The novel jumps to a near present mentioned in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's classic text - yet Artur where the Mockymen have landed, taking the form of pure Dinter, the Gauleiter of Thuringia in the 1920s, before his early intelligences who occupy the bodies of drug addicts - a new drug expulsion, was an Ariosophist. He might have played the role of choice wiping out the mind after a period, leaving the body Watson attributes to him, and Himmler believed in reincarnation. free for use. The government, unable to cope with another Ultimately Watson manages to have Nazi principles save the depression, is happy to use the new tools offered by the aliens world and I do not believe that he believes a word of it - and to suppress opposition, which might be no more than a sort nevertheless before the threat of the Mockymen he makes it true. of racial discrimination. On the other hand, as agent Anna He has created a world of his own imagining. Sharman discovers, perhaps the Mockymen's intentions are not [Available from www.goldengryphon.com]

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Kim Wilkins - Autumn Castle Gollancz, London, 2004, 463pp, £1 7.99, h/b, ISBN 0-575-07573-2 Reviewed by Iain Emsley

In some ways it is difficult to know what to do with the new Kim is a kernel of truth to each tale if the listener has enough time to Wilkins novel, The Autumn Castle (Europa Suite book 1). Having find it. Her linked tales of Eisengrimm and Starlight explore this to successfully carved her name out as a horror writer, she has some degree as well as developing a counter-balance to Mayfridh. turned her hand to a serial fantasy. Yet this is not a bog-standard As well as being transformative stories, they are ones of release. secondary or slipstream world, it becomes the land of fairy tales, Mayfridh makes contact with her mother which changes her an intricately nested doll of stories, or a set of Club Stories. Indeed narrative arc but also, on one level, becomes a matricidal tale. this novel is one of dovetail joints, as fairyland nestles next to our As Christine and Mayfridh's friendship regrows, stories of reality, horror sits side-by-side with fantasy and marchen stories death and murder lie nested in the actions of Jude, Christine's sits next to the full-length novel. boyfriend, and Immanuel Ziegler, the commune's landlord. At Set in an artist's commune in Berlin and the fairy land of some level, both are involved with killing and seem to allow Ewigkreis, the novel revolves around the pairing of Christine (a Wilkins the chance to create a neat little horror novella which struggling artist whose parents were killed in a road accident) and complements the fantasy. In the best tradition of horror, these are Mayfridh (the fairy queen who was stolen as a child from her not one note stories, in terms of retribution and justice, but ones human parents). When Christine concusses herself, she travels to where the morality is put to the practical test. the fairyworld and is brought before the queen to explain herself. Wilkins has taken the essence of the fairy tale and renewed it Mayfridh gradually recognises her and opens a portal between the in her own vision in what rates as her most accomplished novel two worlds so that both women might move freely. Gradually yet. She manages to reuse the tropes and settings and revitalise both come to acknowledge each other and also learn about each them in a new hub of culture in Germany, rather than retracing other's worlds. However, the worlds are not conjoined; they the exact steps, and in so doing goes back to the oral roots of intersect. As they do so, each affects the other, giving rise to the storytelling - though the written form is, paradoxically, concrete. release of fairy's true magic: story. This is something that Wilkins may yet resolve in further volumes. Within the overarching story, Wilkins takes time to give the This book promises so much for the future. characters their own tales of transformation which eventually link together into the larger plot. She has the understanding that there

Gene Wolfe - Innocents Aboard Tor, New York, 2004, 304pp, $25.95, h/b, ISBN 0-765-30790-1 Reviewed by Chris Hill

Innocents Aboard is Gene Wolfe’s latest collection, containing 22 parklands. The story does rather wear its environmental awareness stories. The earliest was published 1988, the latest in 2003 on its sleeve, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. (making the subtitle ‘new fantasy stories’ just a little bit misleading 'The Night Chough’ is a spin-off story from Wolfe’s Long Sun - ‘previously uncollected’ would be nearer the mark). In his books in which Silk’s pet gets involved in a man’s revenge against introduction Wolfe states that the collection contains only fantasy the murderers of his girl. It is an effective tale in its own right, but and horror, but no sf, which is also arguable; at least four are will be particularly interesting for those people who have read the ultimately sf, even if they do not necessarily feel like that to start relevant books, shedding some light on the bird’s relationship with. with one of the gods. 'A Traveller in Desert Lands’ is an effectively As you would expect from Wolfe, there is a wide range of creepy story of ancient power, reminiscent of some of Clark styles. There are fairly straightforward narratives ('The Waif’, ‘The Ashton Smith’s fantasies (coming from a collection called New Night Chough’), legends or fairy stories ('The Legend of Xi Tales of Zothique it is perhaps not surprising). Cygnus’, ‘The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun’), Tall Stories (‘A Another fine story is 'The Lost Pilgrim’ where a time traveller Fish Story’, 'How the Bishop Sailed to Inniskeen’) and ghost goes to study a particular part of history but turns up at the wrong stories ('The Friendship Light’, 'The Walking Sticks’). As with any time. Not only is his knowledge patchy, but he cannot remember collection, not everyone will get equal enjoyment from every where he was supposed to be. It may take the reader a little time story, but any reader will find some things that they like. to pick up on what is happening, but you will probably get there The atmospheric and chilling 'The Tree is my Hat’ is that ahead of the protagonist, which is part of the fun of the story. staple story of the westerner getting involved in a less developed Some of the stories worked less well for this reviewer. I found society that he does not understand as well as he thinks. In tone 'Houston, 1943’, about what befalls a boy’s spirit when separated and content it put me in mind of much of Lucius Shepard, or from his body, very heavy going. Not dissimilar in tone to Tim perhaps Christopher Priest’s Dream Archipelago stories. 'The Power’s America-set novels, but it seemed muddled and I Friendship Light’ is a creepy story of sibling rivalry, let down by definitely lost the plot. Somehow I could not take the haunted title the slightly clumsy execution of the 'twist’ ending. In 'The Waif’, implements of 'The Walking Sticks’ terribly seriously. 'Pocketsful Earth has been invaded and the remnants of humanity are reduced of Diamonds’ strays into Ray Bradbury territory with a story of to a relatively primitive existence. Contact with the aliens is a children dreaming their way into a strange fairground. Alas, it is a crime punishable by being burned at the stake. This ultimately territory that Bradbury maps rather better. Of the remaining tragic story works well because the conclusion is obviously stories, some are just too slight to really stick in the mind ('A Fish inevitable to everyone but the protagonist. Story’, ‘Queen’) and some I did not feel quite came together 'The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun’ is, as mentioned above, ('Slow Children at Play’, 'The Wrapper’). a fairy story in which a sailor stays on an island paradise while a So, overall Innocents Aboard is an enjoyable collection and monkey takes his place on board the ship. The monkey’s journey any Wolfe fan will find something that they will like. It is unlikely, takes him to an unexpected destination in this amusing little tale. however, to convert anyone who is not already an aficionado. In 'Wolfer’ a woman who seems to be able to understand her dogs, becomes involved in a plot to return wolves to American

34 September/October 2004 • Vector 237

These are some of the other books we have seen recently. A mention here does not necessarily preclude a full review in a later issue of Vector.

Poul Anderson - The Boat of a Million Years Simon R. Green - Deathstalker Legacy Tor, New York, 2004, 480pp, $14.95, t/b, ISBN 0-765-31024-4 Gollancz, London, 2004, 504pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 0-575-07452-3 Great quality (as always) paperback re-print from Tor of this classic 1989 novel on Simon R. Green - Deathstalker Return the theme of immortality. Gollancz, London, 2004, 390pp, £18.99, h/b, ISBN 0-575-07508-2 These two novels recount the end of the Golden Age two hundred years after the Isaac Asimov - I, Robot death of Owen Deathstalker to save the Empire and Humanity, and continue the Voyager, London, 2004, 249pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 0-586-02532-4 violent, but extremely witty, Deathstalker series following a few years’ break. After Film tie-in edition of Asimov’s classic collection of robot stories examining the the coronation of King Douglas, the paragon Lewis Deathstalker, the diva and King’s implications of his three laws of robotics (which means you get Will Smith on the fiancee Jesamine Flowers, the conman Brett Random, the psychopath Rose cover looking extremely cool having stolen Angel’s leather coat). If you haven’t read Constantine and a reptiloid called Saturday are outlawed by the Empire. On the run, these, then why not? This was one of the first sf books I remember reading - travelling from world to world in search of the Madness Maze, Lewis must tread the borrowed from the library - so just look how much of an influence it can have. path to glory that his namesake took and save Humanity and the Empire. Better than average traditional heroic fantasy. Neal Asher - The Skinner Tor, New York, 2004, 480pp, $26.95, h/b, ISBN 0-765-30737-5 Ed Greenwood - The Silent House Great to see Neal Asher being published in America, and in a very handsome Tor, New York, 2004, 384pp, $24.95, h/b, ISBN 0-765-30817-7 hardback edition too. This is his second novel, set on the deadly water-world of Part of the Band of Four traditional heroic fantasy series, with the fourth volume, The Splatterjay (which is one of the best names for a planet around). As with all the Dragon's Doom, reviewed in Vector 231 with a less than glowing review. author’s works, this is recommended. His most recent novel, Cowl, was published by Tor UK earlier this year, and was reviewed in Vector 234. Tom Holt - Tall Stories Orbit, London, 2004, 568pp, £8.99, t/p, ISBN 1-84149-345-7 James Barclay - Shadowheart Reprint omnibus edition of two of the author’s earlier comic fantasy novels, Gollancz, London, 2004, 438pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 0-575-07544-9 containing Expecting Someone Taller (from 1987) and Ye Gods (from 1992). I really There’s lots of traditional heroic fantasy published - just look on the shelves in any don’t understand why Orbit is packaging together two unconnected stories in this bookshop - and identifying the wheat from the chaff can be difficult. Which is one of way rather than just individual editions in the new style (other than saving the reader the reasons Vector is here: the main column covers some very routine volumes this money, which is commendable). issue, but Shadowheart is not one of them. Vikki Lee has covered all of Barclay’s works (Shadowheart was reviewed in Vector 232) finding them universally excellent Jane Jensen - Dante's Equation and the very best of today’s heroic fantasy: not to be missed. Her only negative Orbit, London, 2004, 695pp, £7.99, p/b, ISBN 1-84149-306-6 comment concerned the black/red cover design and red-edged pages, thinking that Reviewed in Vector 233 by David M. Roberts, this book was not well-liked, not well- this made it look like an awful ‘60s imported American fiction. (I disagree. It has a liked at all. He described it as unlikeable, flat and with the characters behaving in a simple, elegant, style which makes it stand out from the standard fantasy covers). cliched and slightly hysterical manner. The author appears to be making a serious attempt to produce something that is deeply profound, but failing. It could, however, Stephen Baxter - Coalescent be just the right time for the paperback edition of this book as it is in a similar Gollancz, London, 2004, 536pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 0-575-07553-8 territory to the phenomenally successful The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, so there The first of two particles this column with a Roman theme (see also Roma Eterna). may be a huge market available (which in itself is worrying as I found The Da Vinci This is the first part of the Destiny's Children trilogy, which interweaves the present Code to be poorly plotted, obvious and quite ridiculous). day story of George Poole, searching for a sister he never knew he had, and that of Regina in the dying days of the Roman Empire, as she tries to protect her family. The Stephen Jones and David Sutton (eds) - Dark Terrors 6 gradual exposing of the link between these is fascinating and probably one of Gollancz, London, 2004, 560pp, £7.99, p/b, ISBN 0-575-07407-8 Baxter’s strongest works to date (although I am still unsure about the coda). Reviewed Sixth volume of this horror anthology series (the title is a clue) first published in 2002 in Vector 232 by Gary Dalkin, he found it gripping and intriguing and a more literary and now in mass-market paperback. All stories are original to the collection, coming and personal odyssey than anything Baxter has attempted before. There were some from both well-established names, such as Stephen Baxter, Kim Newman and reservations about pacing but the book is recommended and was short-listed for this Michael Marshall Smith, and less well known ones. As always from these editors, this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award. is an excellent collection and strongly recommended.

Michael Cobley - Shadowgod Greg Keyes - The Briar King Pocket Books, London, 2004, 470pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 0-7434-1 600-7 Tor UK, London, 2004, 553pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 0-330-41945-5 In the traditional heroic fantasy vein, this is the second volume of the Shadowkings The first volume in Keyes’s Kingdom of Thorn and Bone tetralogy is now out in trilogy, the first volume of which, Shadowkings, was reviewed in Vector 220. Vikki paperback and is another traditional heroic fantasy series, with large mythical beasts Lee recommended this series to fantasy readers, and the series does get described as coming to life, a gypsy-like race of humanoid entities and murderous courtly intrigue. ‘gritty,’ 'violent,’ ‘complex’, which is encouraging. But don’t be deceived. Estelle Roberts in Vector 231 described it as all being very well developed and easily engaging the reader’s interest and sympathy. And as the David B. Coe - Seeds of Betrayal author used to be known as ‘J. Gregory Keyes’, who wrote the excellent Age of Tor, New York, 2003, 608pp, $27.95, h/b, ISBN 0-312-87808-7 Unreason series, this is likely to be well above the norm (and why the change? J. Book two of the Winds of the Forelands tetralogy, this is more traditional heroic Gregory sounds way cooler). The first volume of the Age of Unreason series, fantasy (maps but no appendix/cast of characters). Newton's Cannon, has just been published in the UK (and will be reviewed in the next Vector). Eleanor Druse - The Journals of Eleanor Druse Bantam, London, 2004, 249pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 0-553-81696-9 Paul Levinson -The Pixel Eye Now this is an oddity. A tie-in to the Stephen King-developed TV series Kingdom Tor, New York, 2004, 336pp, $14.95, p/b, ISBN 0-765-30131-7 Hospital (as opposed to the far superior Lars von Trier version). This is an In future New York a forensic detective is called to investigate an urgent case - investigation, by the author, of the Kingdom hospital incident - played completely squirrels are missing from Central Park. Ok, I’m sold. Unfortunately, when the straight and as if it were real (you mean it isn’t?). hardback was reviewed in Vector 232 the overall result did not match the premise. Colin Bird found the characterisation dull and the book never attaining the kind of Steven Erikson - Gardens of the Moon committed tone a story with such wacky ideas requires to be convincing. Still worth Tor, New York, 2004, 496pp, $24.95, h/b, ISBN 0-765-31001-5 trying. American hardback edition, which is the start of a mammoth ten-book Malazan Book of the Fallen series (so you can guess from the title that we are in traditional heroic Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake fantasy territory). The UK edition was reviewed by Vikki Lee way back in May 1 999 Tor, New York, 2004, 322pp, $24.95, h/b, ISBN 0-765-30503-8 (Vector 205) when she found it to be one of the rare fantasy books that not only American edition of MacLeod’s latest novel, published in the UK earlier this year attempts to be huge in scope, but actually succeeds in being so. In the UK the series when it was reviewed very favorably by Peter Young in Vector 235 (and selected as a is up to the fifth book with Midnight Tides having recently been published by Recommended Read). This is a standalone space opera and highly recommended. Bantam (and we hope to include a review in a future Vector). Interestingly this household had the same reaction to the cover of the American

35 Vector 237 • September/October 2004 edition: wanted to pick it up and read it right then. Whereas the reaction to the UK Robert Sawyer - Far-Seer cover was: all right, may pick it up one day (but don’t think I ever will). The superb Tor, New York, 2004, 304pp, $14.95, p/b, ISBN 0-765-30974-2 cover art on the American edition is by Stephen Martiniere. First volume in the Quintaglio Ascension, this is a paperback re-print of this 1992 novel. The premise here is that aliens transplanted Earth’s dinosaurs to the moon of a L. E. Modesitt - Wellspring of Chaos gas-giant world, where they evolved into intelligent saurians and are now emerging Tor, New York, 2004, 448pp, $27.95, h/b, ISBN 0-765-30907-6 into the stars. Difficult to resist any book with intelligent dinosaurs in it. The twelfth volume in the ongoing Recluse series. So this is either something you have been looking forward to or just another traditional heroic fantasy, depending on Robert Silverberg - Roma Eterna whether you are a fan of the series and have been keeping up. Gollancz, London, 2004, 385pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 0-575-07556-2 Second Roman-themed book this column. This one takes as its premise that the Andre Norton & Lyn McConchie - Beast Master's Circus Roman Empire did not fall. The implications of this are then explored over the next Tor, New York, 2004, 320pp, $24.95, h/b, ISBN 0-765-30042-7 1,500 years with ten chapters, each set at different times throughout the period. This is the fourth in a sequence of novels that started with The Beast Master, in 1 959 Tanya Brown, in Vector 233, was impressed by this approach with the large events of (yes, 1959), followed by Lord of Thunder (1962) and Beast Master's Ark (2002). history played out in the background, between the chapters, and between the lines, That’s quite some time-span! This is described as “fast-paced, adventurous science concluding that the book was an understated and thoughtful alternate history. fiction". Norman Spinrad - The Druid King Robert Rankin - The Witches of Chiswick Time Warner, London, 2004, 564pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 0-7515-3530-3 Gollancz, London, 2004, 434pp, £6.99, p/b, ISBN 0-575-07545-7 An almost straight historical novel, with just a hint of fantasy, from the author best Paperback edition of the latest from the very popular humorist Rankin that has the known for the brilliant Bug Jack Barron. The story is built around Julius Caesar’s eponymous Witches re-writes 19th century history so that The War of the Worlds campaign to conquer Gaul and the clash between the two cultures. Reviewed in was based on a real event, the Invisible Man existed, Queen Victoria had an affair Vector 229 where Sue Thomason with Dr. Watson and Jack the Ripper was a terminator robot from the future. Which found it to be mostly plot-driven and not a book to read for sensitive character makes this all sound rather fun (but remember, it’s by Robert Rankin). Interesting development or deep cultural background, but it was commended to late-adolescent quote on the back cover which describes Rankin’s prose as a cross between Douglas action-adventure fans. Adams and Aaron Sorkin by way of Mother Goose: bizarre. David Zindell - Lord of Lies Adam Roberts - Polystom Voyager, London, 2004, 675pp, £7.99, p/b, ISBN 0-00-648621-5 Gollancz, London, 2004, 344pp, £6.99, p/b,ISBN 0-575-07541-4 Second volume in Ea Cycle (which is ominous - could be never-ending) this is a Robert’s fifth novel is high concept sf, set in a world where Polystom can sail through massive traditional heroic fantasy work, complete with maps and many appendices. the atmosphere to nearby planets. Told in three parts - ‘A Love Story’, ‘A Murder (How many times have I had to use ‘traditional heroic fantasy’ in this column? Prize Story’ and ‘A Ghost Story’ - and using the conceit of story coming from a found for the first correct answer emailed to me). manuscript (incomplete, partly corrupted, and in translation). Andrew M. Butler had a number of problems with the novel. Reviewed in full in Vector 232 he concluded that “there’s nothing wrong with being playful - as I think Roberts is trying to be here - but I’m not sure which rules he is playing by".

Vector #237 - Index of Books Reviewed

Poul Anderson - The Boat of a Million Years [P]...... 35 Tanith Lee - Cast a Bright Shadow [PH]...... 26 Neal Asher - The Skinner [P]...... 35 Paul Levinson - The Pixel Eye [P]...... 35 Isaac Asimov - I, Robot [P]...... 35 Steve Lines & John B. Ford (eds.) - The Derelict of Death and Tony Ballantyne - Recursion [GD]...... 17 other stories [SM] 26 Ashok K. Banker - Demons of Chitrakut [KVB]...... 18 James Lovegrove - Gig [DMB]...... 27 James Barclay - Shadowheart [P]...... 35 Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake [P]...... 35 Stephen Baxter - Coalescent [P]...... 35 George Mann - The Human Abstract [NH]...... 28 Ben Bova - The Silent War [MG]...... 18 Lyn McConchie & Andre Norton - Beast Master's Circus [P]...... 36 Max Brooks - The Zombie Survival Guide [COMLB] [SM]...... 19 Ian McDonald - River of Gods [PNB]...... 27 N. M. Browne - Basilisk [EAB]...... 20 L. E. Modesitt - Darknesses [LB]...... 28 Charles Butler - The Fetch of Mardy Watt [AMB]...... 20 L. E. Modesitt - Wellspring of Chaos [P]...... Ramsey Campbell - Alone with the Horrors [MG]...... 20 Patrick Moore & David A. Hardy - Futures: 50 Years in Space [COMLB] 23 Trudi Canavan - The Novice [AAA]...... 21 Caiseal Mor - The Well of Yearning [LH]...... 29 Steve Cash - The Meq [ER]...... 22 Larry Niven - Ringworld's Children [AAA]...... 29 Michael Cobley - Shadowgod [P]...... 35 Andre Norton & Lyn McConchie - Beast Master's Circus [P]...... 36 David B. Coe - Seeds of Betrayal [P]...... 35 Stefan Petrucha - The Tunnel at the End of the Light [NH]...... 30 Peter Crowther (Ed.) - Postscripts #1 [NH]...... 22 Philip Pullman - Lyra’s Oxford [AMB]...... 30 Marianne De Pierres - Code Noir [CB2]...... 30 Robert Rankin - The Witches of Chiswick [P]...... 36 Eleanor Druse - The lournals of Eleanor Druse [P]...... 35 Joe Rattigan - Ghosts Far from Subtle [SM]...... 26 Steven Erikson - Gardens of the Moon [P]...... 35 Adam Roberts - Polystom [P]...... 36 John B. Ford & Steve Lines (eds.) - The Derelict of Death and Rudy Rucker - Frek and the Elixir [GW]...... 31 other stories [SM] 26 Robert Sawyer - Far-Seer [P]...... 36 John Grant & Audre Vysniauskas - Digital Art for the 21st Robert Silverberg - Roma Eterna [P]...... 36 Century: Rendrosity [COMLB] 23 Norman Spinrad - The Druid King [P]...... 36 Simon R. Green - Deathstalker Legacy [P]...... 35 Caroline Stevermer - A Scholar of Magics [PS]...... 32 Simon R. Green - Deathstalker Return [P]...... 35 David Sutton & Stephen Jones (eds) - Dark Terrors 7 [P]...... 35 Ed Greenwood - The Silent House [P]...... 35 Nicholas Tucker - Darkness Visible: Inside the World of David A. Hardy & Patrick Moore - Futures: 50 Years in Space [COMLB] 23 Philip Pullman [AMB] 30 Tom Holt - Tall Stories [P]...... 35 Christopher Varian - Dr Tim (Book One) [GW]...... 32 Kate Jacoby - Trial of Fire [CB1]...... 23 Audre Vysniauskas & John Grant - Digital Art for the 21st Jane Jensen - Dante's Equation [P]...... 35 Century: Rendrosity [COMLB] 23 Diana Wynne Jones - Changeover [PH]...... 24 Mark Walker - Amida: A Novel [KVB]...... 32 Stephen Jones (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Vampires [COMLB]...... 24 Ian Watson - Mockymen [LJH]...... 33 Stephen Jones and David Sutton (eds) - Dark Terrors 6 [P]...... 35 Kim Wilkins - Autumn Castle [IE]...... 34 Paul Kane - Funny Bones [SM]...... 26 Gene Wolfe - Innocents Aboard [CH]...... 34 Greg Keyes - The Briar King [P]...... 35 David Zindell - Lord of Lies [P]...... 36 Stephen King - Song of Susannah [AF]...... 25

Reviewers Key: AAA - Andrew A. Adams; AF - Alan Fraser; AMB - Andrew M. Butler; CB1 - Cherith Baldry; CB2 - Colin Bird; CH - Chris Hill; COMLB - Colin Odell and Mitch Le Blanc; DMB - Dave M. Roberts; EAB - Elizabeth A. Billinger ; ER - Estelle Roberts; GD - Gary Dalkin; GW - Gary Wilkinson; IE - Iain Emsley; KVB - K.V. Bailey ; LB - Lynne Bispham; LH - Lesley Hatch ; LJH - L.J. Hurst; MG - Mark Greener; NH - Niall Harrison; P - Particle; PH - Penny Hill; PNB - Paul N. Billinger; PS - Pamela Stuart; SM - Simon Morden.

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